Foreign Land Page 3

  George, probing for the crater in the front wall, was a late, refined specimen of West Coast Man. The region had created its own system of natural selection, and George had the right genes. Eighty years ago, when malaria and haematuric fevers had made quick work of putting Europeans through their African entrance exam, it had been the fat men who died first. Their ships put in to Lagos, Dakar and Bom Porto, and the fat men went out on the town. They had just enough time to write their first letter home before the shivers started. Then they passed blood in their urine. In a fortnight, maybe three weeks, they were dead. The mattresses they left behind were so sopping with perspiration that they had to be left out in the sun for two days before they could be burned.

  The fat men were buried in long columns in the cemetery on the hill over the bay: American whaling captains, Portuguese army lieutenants, English cocoa merchants, French mineral prospectors. But the thin men toughed it out. On the Coast, the branco or toubob (in the Wolof interior) was an attenuated, ectomorphic specimen who left the tallest locals somewhere down around his chest and shoulders. George, at six foot four, was all knuckles, knees and elbows. Any self-respecting mosquito would have scorned him as a poor ship’s biscuit of a dinner, and helicoptered off in search of something fleshier.

  Zapp! Pause. Whock! Longer pause. Flam! George was working on Teddy’s backhand down the side wall.

  “Scumbag!”

  George had always been impressed by Teddy’s command of American vernacular. It seemed a lot to have brought back from two years at the Business School of the University of Wisconsin. Teddy, referring to his alma mater, called it Bizz-Wizz. George suspected Teddy of having made it up, just as he suspected that many of Teddy’s more colourful American obscenities might have raised blank looks if voiced anywhere within the United States. Did anyone really say—

  “Diddly-shitting corn-hole!”?

  George found it hard to believe so, and directed the ball at a soggy patch, and missed, and lost the point, but won the game a minute later.

  “Teddy—what can I get you?”

  Laughing, turbaning his head in a striped towel, the Minister of Communications said: “Me? I’ll sink a Sun Top. Make it two.”

  George’s legs felt rubbery. Victory always left him weaker than defeat; and for the last month he’d been on a winning streak. It had started on the day he learned from Vera that she and Teddy had shared a room at the Luanda Mar hotel at the congress in Angola where Vera had been Health and Teddy had been Transport. The two words were altogether too expressive for comfort. That wasn’t the first time, apparently, nor, George assumed sadly, had it been the last. Now, wobbling slightly as he made his way to the bar, George very much hoped that it was a new vein of pugnacity on his part that made him win, and not embarrassment on Teddy’s that obliged him to lose.

  The Armenian already had the dusty bottle of Chivas Regal waiting for him. “Is good?” He showed his set of very white and very loose false teeth. They had probably been bought on mail-order.

  “Yes,” George said, “that’s the one.” He was used to thinking of the barman as a relic left over from Montedor’s colonial heyday. In fact, only the shrunken jaw of the man was really old; the rest of his face was lightly lined and there was still black in his hair. He and George, two foreigners in a foreign land, were coevals. It was a nasty thought, and he strangled it as soon as it was born, spoiling the Scotch with a long splash of desalinated water.

  Teddy, sprawled in a chair, bare legs wide, his face framed in the towel like a woman’s after a bath, said: “You went to Guia. That’s one helluva drive.”

  Vera had had to inspect the new hospital there. George had driven her in the Port Authority landrover. With Vera preoccupied and George depressed, it hadn’t been a successful trip.

  “Yes,” said George. “I met some of our new friends.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Teddy said carelessly, sucking at his Sun Top.

  He had been forced to leave the road to make way for a column of Soviet-built tanks. Montedor’s single American helicopter-gunship dickered in the sky overhead. Then, twenty miles short of Guia, they’d met a roadblock. The soldiers manning it had shouted to each other in Spanish. Though they wore the uniforms of the Republican Army of Montedor, they wore them with a kind of crispness and dash that was quite beyond the reach of the local militia.

  “The Hispano-Suiza brigade,” George said. “At a road block.”

  Teddy stopped sucking. “Who do you mean, George?”

  “Cubans.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I am not.” George was irrelevantly pleased at Teddy’s surprise. He’d supposed that Teddy would have already heard about the Cubans from Vera.

  “At a road block? I think that is not possible.”

  “Oh, they were Cubans. They weren’t making any secret of it, either.”

  “Fucking Peres,” Teddy said. “In this country we have eleven military advisers, Peres says. You do not put eleven military advisers on a fucking road block. I would like to use your name, George. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not. I didn’t see anything sinister or undercover in the thing. It was just a Cuban road block.”

  “That man is a terrorist. We have no need of Cubans to solve the problem.” Over Teddy’s head there sailed, in sepia, the two-masted winner of the Dakar race in 1933.

  The problem was that there were two kinds of Montedorians, as unlike as tigers and ocelots. Teddy was one kind: when you looked at his face you saw an odd crowd of different people there. His hair belonged to an African slave, his nose to a Portuguese slave trader, his mouth to a Syrian shopkeeper, his eyes to a British sailor. Teddy’s skin was a smooth khaki—the mongrel, camouflage, Creole colour. The other kind of Montedorian was as black as basalt. The Wolofs of the interior had their own language. They were nomads, farmers and hunters, where the Creoles were townsmen, fishermen, entrepreneurs. The Wolofs were Muslim, the Creoles Catholic. During the years of drought the gap between the two nations of Montedor, between the coast and the hills, had opened out from a fissure to a canyon. The Creoles suffered from bad nerves and insomnia: the command posts in the mountains, the tanks and road blocks, were supposed to help them sleep more soundly.

  “Peres does not want my road,” Teddy said. “He says it is a danger.” At present, the cobbled three-lane highway petered out seven miles beyond Bom Porto. After that, it was just a narrow pathway through the shale. “We have the promise of money from the World Bank. I see the Egyptian again next week. It is not so much the road itself, it is the building of the road. It is a major employment project. I will have Wolofs working on that road. With Creoles. In the same gang. Communication” He pronounced the word the Portuguese way. Comunicão. The ão was a soft and nasal miaow.

  “And all Peres sees is an army of hungry Wolofs marching down your road?”

  “Peres is a monkey. He loves guns. He hates my Ministry. The guy has a theory … you know? … that bad communications are always the safest.”

  George laughed. “Well, there’s something to be said for that. I was thinking rather along the same lines myself, earlier today.” He patted his jacket pockets, searching for his pipe, while Teddy watched him with a sour stare.

  “Oh—nothing to do with your road. In quite another context.” There had been a letter from his daughter in the lunchtime mail. George had been rattled by it. For one diverting moment, he saw Sheila as a Wolof charging down a dusty mountainside with a long banana knife.

  “That road is the most important piece of infrastructure in Montedor. We need communication like … like we need water.”

  “I suppose we do,” George said, still thinking of his daughter.

  “You are going to stay on, then?”

  “No … I wish I could. I can’t, Teddy.”

  “Sometimes I think you are a meatball.”

  “Oh, so do I, old love. So do I.”

  “You rapped with Varbosa?”

  “Yes. It didn’t c
hange things.”

  “Special Adviser to the President on Foreign Trade … Sounds good.”

  “You’ve got too many advisers already.”

  “Not that kind, George.”

  “I’d just be a one-man quango.”

  “Say again?”

  “Quango? Oh, it’s something that’s all the rage in England now, or so they say. A quasi-autonomous government organization. It’s a sort of bureaucratic racket. Designed to keep old troopers in gravy.”

  “I think we have some quaggas here already.” Teddy flipped the top of a cigarette pack and began to write the word inside it.

  “En, gee, oh,” George said.

  “We will miss you here, George,” said Teddy. His voice had lost its usual overlay of cab driver Milwaukee.

  “I’ll miss you too.” George picked up his glass of Chivas Regal and shielded his eyes with it.

  “Perhaps you will not be happy there, I think. You will come back. Aristide will leave the door open on that job, I know—”

  “It’d be nice to think so.”

  “When I am President, you can be Minister of Defence. Peres I will post as ambassador to Youkay. The cold weather is good for that man, I think; maybe his nuts freeze off.”

  Outside the club, the night was warm and palpable as steam. At the opening of the courtyard on to the street, the two men embraced for a moment. Teddy smelled strongly of Sun Top and more faintly of—Vera?

  “I’ve got the Humber. You want a ride?”

  “No,” George said, “I’ll walk, thanks.”

  “Ciao, George. Next time, I knock you for a loop, okay?”

  “If you say so. Goodnight, Teddy—”

  The minister crossed the street to the waterfront where his car was parked on the cinders under a lone acacia.

  “Hey-George?”

  “Yes?”

  “Come back and be a quango!”

  The Rua Kwame Nkruma was homesick for Lisbon. Portuguese merchants had built it as the Rua Alcantara, a pretty daydream of steep terraced houses with front yards full of flowers, displaced by twenty-eight degrees of latitude. Gardens had burned dry, pastel stucco fronts were cracking up like icing on a mouldy cake, orange pantiles had tumbled into the street and wooden balconies were peeling away from their parent walls.

  A few of the houses had been recolonized as government offices. Others had been used by the army as convenient hoardings on which to paint Party messages. In letters that were six feet high, the front of Number 12 said:

  NO TO LAZINESS!

  NO TO OPPORTUNISM!

  YES TO LABOUR!

  YES TO STUDY!

  At night the street was dark and empty, the moonlit slogan as lonely as a film playing on the screen of a deserted cinema.

  One jumpy electric light showed on the street, from behind the first-floor shutters of Number 28. The house was in rather better shape than its neighbours. The grizzled banana palm in the front garden was as tall as the house itself, whose bleached wooden columns held up a flirtatious structure of narrow balconies, carved trellises and fretwork screens. It looked like a place designed to keep secrets in. All the house now contained was George.

  Stooping under the low ceiling, he put a pan of water to boil on the calor gas ring and punctured the top of a tin of steak and kidney pudding to stop it from exploding as it warmed. A small lizard was spreadeagled on the whitewashed wall over the sink. As George dropped the steak and kidney pudding into the saucepan, it skeetered up the wall and hid in a crack, its lidless eye a wary needlepoint of light.

  George was rattled. He needed time to think. He poured himself a tumblerful of Dão and sank it like beer.

  He could recite the words of his daughter’s letter by heart. What was her game? The tone was imperious. It had the clear ring of Admiral’s Orders. Signal your intentions … Report immediately upon arrival … George was evidently supposed to snap his heels and salute. Did the girl think he’d entered on his dotage? The giveaway, of course, was the word we. It had stood out on the page like an atoll in an ocean. So Sheila was in the plural now. George guessed that the house in Clapham must be some sort of commune for women. The bold instructions didn’t come from Sheila; they must issue from the entire sisterhood. When she wrote of “habitable rooms”, George saw a cloister of bare guest chambers, with books of meditation stacked neatly by each narrow single bed, and heard the swish of the sisters’ long gowns as they patrolled the corridor outside. It sounded like bad news to George. Was Sheila happy, living like this? Was it a Sapphic arrangement? He assumed so.

  That he had fathered Sheila at all was a profoundly unsettling fact. It was like finding that one was the heir to someone whom one knew only from items of gossip in newspapers, and it raised a similar cloud of guilty whys and wherefores.

  It was a thousand years since he had felt himself to be her father, her his child. It had been like that once. He remembered holding a torch to the print of a book in a darkened room. Sheila was ill with measles. He was reading her to sleep. The book was The Wind in the Willows. To Sheila in Aden, the Thames Valley of Ratty, Mole and Mr Toad was as delightfully unreal as Samarkand. George made it up for her: the leaves of the green trees feathering the water like long fingers; the freshly rinsed colours of England after a summer shower; the tumbledown brick cottages under their bonnets of thatch; men and girls in punts; lock keepers’ gardens; mysterious weirpools where big pike swirled.

  “Do Mr Toad again, Daddy—”

  George, perched on the edge of the Indian Ocean, went toot-tooting his way through Wallingford and Goring as Sheila fell to sleep, a drowsy giggle the last sound from under her thin blue Navy blanket.

  A year after the divorce, George came back to London in December. Busy with visits to shipping agents, he’d asked the girl at the hotel desk to buy him two tickets for a matinée of “Puss in Boots” and had gone to Liverpool Street to meet his daughter from the train.

  She was a foundling. Sternly buckled into her schoolgirl gaberdine, she stepped from a trailing cloud of thick steam from the engine. Her hair was pulled back from her skull in plaits. She wore spectacles with round gunmetal frames which magnified her puritan, Tribulation Wholesome eyes. When Sheila’s eyes came to rest on George, he felt arraigned in them.

  God knew what Angela had told the child; God knew what Sheila herself, this vessel of probity, thought she knew. Whatever it was, she clearly wasn’t telling George. She walked by his side like a wimpled nun. It must have pained her, George felt, to be seen in the company of a man of such desperate reputation. Even before they left the station, he wanted to explain to strangers that his intentions were innocent, this girl really was his daughter.

  By the time they were rounding St Paul’s in the taxi, he knew that the tickets to the pantomime in his pocket were an offence. He’d meant them to be a surprise. A stupid idea. He should have known. A panto? How could he have dared to inflict anything so frivolous on this severe stranger?

  All through lunch he felt punished. Sheila drank water, and stared at him each time he gulped at his wine, then set him questions about his health. She dismissed the ice cream when it came and said it was bad for her teeth. He asked her, thinking sadly of the panto tickets, if she was at all interested in the theatre.

  “We never go in Norwich,” Sheila said. “In any case, Mummy finds it jolly hard to make ends meet.”

  So they went instead to a news cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue and saw the huge bald baby face of Eisenhower, triumphant in his re-election. George sneaked sideways glances at his daughter in the stalls: her eyes were fixed on the screen, her hands folded in the lap of her mackintosh. She seemed utterly indifferent to the presence of her father. If only … if only … George thought of “Puss in Boots” just a few doors up the street. They would be into the second act by now. George imagined another father, another daughter, leaning together over a shared box of chocolates in the dark; the Dame shouting “Oh, yes, it is!”, and the auditorium of children roaring back �
��Oh, no, it isn’t!” Not his child. She was gazing at a sequence of cold black and white pictures of Anthony Eden opening a new civic housing project in Birmingham.

  When they left the cinema, Sheila consented to tea at Lyons’ Corner House on Oxford Circus. Regent Street was hung with lights and the pavement swarmed with people in hats and winter coats looting the shops for presents. Sheila and George were carried away from each other by the crowd. He stood, craning, waiting for her outside Hamley’s window, incongruously framed by woolly bears and Hornby train sets like Father Christmas in person. When Sheila caught up with him she paid no attention to the childish window; indeed, the whole season seemed to be beneath her notice.

  “Oh—there you are. Is this Lyons’ place much further?” she said, hardly checking her northward stride.

  An hour later, George saw her to her train and went back to St James’s Street, where he lay on the bed and cried because he’d lost his child and because it was Christmas. The hotel linen was newly laundered, stiff and comfortless.

  What was her game?

  He eased the steak and kidney pudding from its tin. It collapsed on the plate and leaked a pool of black gravy. The lizard was back on station, as fixed and still as a double-dagger sign on an otherwise blank chart. George, bearing his unappetising supper to the table, was unsteady on his pins. His calf and thigh muscles hurt like hell. Every time he moved, he tweaked a fresh ligament. He felt his heart in his ribcage like a trapped quail beating its bony wings. In Cornwall, he thought dully, he’d better take up golf and settle for an old man’s nine-hole ramble round the links and a round of gin and tonics with the other crocks at the clubhouse bar.

  The oddest thing of all about Sheila was That Book. It had arrived two years ago, in a cushioned bag that spread grey fluff all over the table and floor. When George finally found a means of entry to its contents, it yielded an object almost as astonishing as a bomb. It was the size and weight of a desk encyclopedia. Its jacket reproduced, in good colour, a reclining Titian nude with the words The Noblest Station overprinted across the painting in white rubber-stamp lettering.