Foreign Land Page 6

  “Not exactly,” George said. “I was just begging a cigarette.”

  “Oh—Diana Pym … George Grey. George is just back from Africa. Diana’s a great gardener.”

  George noticed that, indeed, the flat-heeled brown shoes of the Pym woman were flaked with dried mud. They did not go well with her black evening dress, which must have cost a lot of money about a quarter of a century ago.

  Sue claimed a “When we were stationed in Malaya”, and Nicola came back with a “When I was in New York”. The score was going well enough for them to afford to disqualify “When Gilbert worked at Lazard’s”. Barbara Stevenson had said “When we were out in Kenya” for the second time, but this, too, wasn’t counted since Barbara Stevenson was a separate When-I game in her own right. The girls moved among the guests with trays of canapés, pretending they were working for MI5. Sue said that Patrick Cairns had been trying to peer down the front of her dress, but Nicola said no way; everyone knew that Cairns was only interested in little brown boys. “Unless, of course,” Nicola said, “he was just trying to see if you’d got a penis down there.”

  George stood at the window and watched the spooling water. The tide had turned and it was travelling fast downstream in a sweep of simmering tar. The buoys that marked the edge of the channel were half-submerged by it, and the torn tree branches which had piled up against the buoys were waving as if they were drowning. The reflected party lay on the water in broken panes of light.

  He was joined by Rupert Walpole.

  “Well, how are you settling in?”

  “Oh, quite nicely, thanks. Still feels a bit odd to be here, like being jetlagged with a hangover. One gets astonished by the most ordinary things.”

  “It’s early days yet,” Rupert said. “I must say I rather envy you—having somewhere to retire to. I’ve only got a couple of years before I come up for the chop myself. What I dread is staying on with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs, with the works a quarter of a mile up the road. That’s going to be the hard bit.”

  “Yes,” George said. “I thought of that too. That’s pretty much why I came home.”

  “I suppose we just have to learn how to be old folks.” He turned back from the window to face his party. “You know what Truro people call St Cadix now? God’s waiting room.”

  At 10.30, the Walpoles’ hall was pungent with the smell of wet coats. In the crush, Brigadier Eliot was being gallant under the mistletoe and Denis Wright was shouting, “Looks as if someone’s balkanized my hat.”

  “George here is earless,” announced Polly Walpole. “Diana? Why don’t you drop him off? You know—Thalassa—the cottage on the bend.”

  “Really—I can walk,” George said.

  “It’s no trouble,” said Diana Pym. “You’re on my way.”

  The long drawing room had emptied. Nicola and Sue were totting up the score.

  “Thirty-two,” Sue said.

  “No, thirty-one,” said Nicola. “You must have counted a Home as an Abroad.”

  Diana Pym’s car was, like her shoes, old and muddy. The butts in the ashtray were packed and crusty as a nugget of iron pyrites. As George closed the passenger door and the interior light went out, he recognized a paperback book lying, dogeared and broken-spined, on the shelf under the dashboard. It was only when the car was dark and the book no more than an afterimage that he saw its cover: The Noblest Station by S. V. Grey. He glanced across at Diana Pym, who was having difficulty trying to make the engine fire on more than one uncertain cylinder. Did she know Sheila was his daughter? Did she think she had a famously insensitive patriarch for a passenger?

  The car grizzled, whined and started. They rolled slowly across a grass bank and stopped short of where the Stevensons’ Daimler blocked the drive sideways on. Perry Stevenson was driving, but Barbara had the starring role. She stood in the blaze of the headlamps in a tan riding mac and shouted “Come on! Come on! Forward just a smidgeon, now!” She was waving her arms like a policeman. She turned to the audience of waiting cars in the dark garden. “Sorry everyone! We’re almost there!”

  “What were you?” said Diana Pym.

  “Sorry?”

  “Everybody here was something. It’s like reincarnation. What were you?”

  “Oh … I ran a sort of gas station cum grocer’s shop.”

  “In Africa—”

  “Yes,” George said. “In Africa.”

  “What part?”

  “Montedor. At the bottom of the bulge. One block down from Senegal.”

  The Daimler showed a clean pair of red tail lights. Diana Pym followed it out into Fore Street, where it creamed along fatly ahead. The Stevensons made the street glow with their passing. They lit the fishermen’s cottages, repainted now in adobe white and crabshell pink. They lit the rustic timber shingles with the new house names. Topgallants. Spinnakers. Crow’s Nest. Malibu.

  When George first visited his parents in St Cadix, Fore Street had been sober—a long and narrow tunnel of dripping slate and granite. Now it was the colour of romperwear, of second infancy. The fishermen had all gone—up to the council houses or out to the bald cemetery at St Austell; and few of the new cottagers were here on winter weekdays. Their windows were dark, their shingles rocked in the wind on the ends of their chains. A fairylit Christmas tree stood in the window of one darkened room; in another a television picture of a golf course disclosed that someone was at home.

  Diana Pym drove as if there were landmines in the road, her head anxiously far forward, her hands gripping the wheel tight. Her little, angular wrists made George think of the clean skeletons of very small animals … stoats, voles, wrens. She was wincing at the dazzle of following lights in the rear view mirror. Without thinking, George reached up and twisted the mirror away from her face.

  “Oh—thanks,” she said.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Just coming up to five years now.” Her voice, gruff with cigarettes, had a touch of American (or was it Australian?) in it. “I suppose that puts me close to graduation.”

  “Leaving, you mean?”

  “No. Staying. They used to say it took twenty-five years to be accepted. Now they’ve had to cut it down to five. Pressure of circumstances. Everybody was dying long before they qualified.”

  George found it difficult to put together the separate bits of Diana Pym: the miniature wrists and ragged gardener’s nails, her panicky driving and her confident, barking style of speech. She seemed to him frail and shaggy all at once.

  “Thalassa, Polly said?”

  “Yes,” said George.

  “What a pretty name—”

  “It was my father’s idea. He was very proud of his theological college Greek.”

  It was one of his most irksome vanities. George could still hear him intoning complacently over the breakfast table, “, oldboy-Gnothy see-out-on. Know thyself!” He called his parishioners ; and the defining essence of hoi polloi was that they were barred from knowing the meanings of words like Thalassa. When, in 1960, George’s mother had written to him on the brand new headed notepaper (“We think the name is rather original. Daddy says it certainly has the locals foxed!”) he’d shuddered, and addressed his reply to 48, Upper Marine Walk. It was only when his father died two years later that George grudgingly adopted Thalassa. It still struck him as a perfectly absurd name for a cottage.

  “He was the vicar here once, was he?”

  “No, they just came here to retire.”

  The car laboured in third gear up the hill, past the yacht club and the gothic hotel. Thalassa was at the top, on its own promontory of pine-fringed rock, where it straddled the angle of the bend. George had left the lights on, and the house goggled back at him from its perch. George found it impossible to think of it as his own. Its front of whitewashed lumpy stone always put him in mind of his father’s face; tonight it wore an expression of solemn petulance, as if it had spent a long and lonely evening storing up complaints against his return.

 
“Can I offer you a drink?” George said. The engine was still running. Diana Pym switched it off.

  “Please. The Walpoles’ punch is one of the penalties one has to pay for Christmas here.” He was surprised to find an ally in Diana Pym. She hadn’t struck him as the ally type.

  Outside the car, he could hear the sea burbling and sucking at the rocks a hundred feet below. Beyond the single tall chimneypot on the cottage roof, the Atlantic clouds were racing in the sky, but the headland shielded this side of the estuary from the west wind and the air was quiet.

  “What a marvellous position,” Diana Pym said.

  “Yes. At least, in the mornings. Night seems to start around lunchtime when the sun goes over the top of the hill.”

  “You have a garden, too?”

  “In theory.” He had not worked out where the garden ended and the common land of gorse, dead bracken and knobby granite outcrops began. At the back of the cottage he’d found some cabbages that had run wild and looked as if they were trying to turn into trees, three broken cloches and a variety of bamboo canes with loops of green twine hanging from them. They must have supported something once.

  They walked through a soft and smelly mulch of rotten pine needles. At the door, George ferreted for his keys while Diana Pym looked at the brass dolphin doorknocker.

  “That was another of my father’s ideas,” George said.

  “It’s rather handsome.”

  “You’ll have to excuse me, I’m afraid; I’m still just camping out here. I’m waiting for my stuff to come by ship and the place has been pretty well derelict since my mother died.”

  George wished, suddenly, that he had not invited her in. He didn’t want anyone else to see Thalassa. The house shamed him. His parents’ houses always had shamed him; he couldn’t walk through their doors without feeling surly and half-grown, dropping ten, then twenty, now more than forty years, as he faced up to their familiar, doggish clutter.

  “What can I get you? Basically, I’ve just got vodka, Scotch or gin—”

  “Scotch will be fine. With a little water, please.”

  The bottles were still in the cardboard box in which they’d been delivered by the off-licence. George allowed Diana Pym a measure which he thought she should be able to finish in ten minutes at the outside. For himself he poured a tall anaesthetic slug, and topped Diana Pym’s glass up with water until it was on the same level as his own.

  “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.