Foreign Land

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 racket 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 rooms. 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!”

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 change 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.

He’d known, of course, that Sheila had written a book, and had pictured it clearly as a slim and sensitive novel, about an adolescent growing up in a town much like Norwich, perhaps. He had looked forward to reading it, and to sending his congratulatory letter. (“It reminded me vividly of the young Elizabeth Bowen.”) This he had not expected. Its title came from a couplet that Sheila had used as an ironic epigraph:

Seek to be good, but aim not to be great;

A woman’s noblest station is retreat.

From the first page he learned that the book was “a study of female submission” in Western culture, and by page 2 the author had mastered the distinction between submission and subjection. The more George looked into it, the more the thing surprised him. He was bewildered by the kind of statistic with which the author berated him: the fact, for instance, that in 1974, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, 76 % of married couples still relied on the sheath as their primary means of contraception. How on earth would anyone know that? That was rum; but what was rummer was the way the author followed it with an exchange between Millamant and Mirabel in Congreve’s “The Way of the World”, where, apparently, the attitude of the women of Tower Hamlets was ingeniously foreshadowed.

Most of all, George was surprised by the author’s high spirits. She was — well, funny. She dealt with her submissive women with a kind of irritable glee. She lined up real women along with women in literature and women in paintings, and shook the nonsense out of all of them. When George forgot for a moment that this scathing author was his daughter, she made him laugh, and then he remembered.

For Sheila wasn’t in the least bit funny. There wasn’t a glimmer of amusement in her. Watching her magnified eyes across a restaurant table (her glasses grew noticeably thicker every year), George felt himself scrutinized by a pair of stuffed olives. There was resentfulness there, yes. Humour, no. One might as well expect to share a joke with Little Dorrit, at whose expense the author of The Noblest Station was briskly clever.

But there was worse to come. The author had mined her pages at intervals with the word “patriarchal”. George felt that this explosive multisyllable had been laid there especially for him to stumble over and be wounded by.

Harbouring the book in the house at all seemed to George to be like keeping a polecat for a pet. He did his best to tame it, shelving it in its proper place among the G’s, between Goodbye to All That and Diary of a Nobody. It didn’t work. The name S. V. Grey stuck out as importunately as if it was lit in neon. The book itself was so much taller and fatter and newer than George’s orangeback Penguins and foxed Tauchnitz Library editions. Its coloured jacket bulged away from its spine, as if the book had developed a wild and irrepressible life of its own. Nor was this just a function of the way that George felt got-at by the contents: it was the first object in the house that any visitor spotted. Once, people had remarked on the ornate Adeni oak chest in which George kept his papers or on the dwarf snowbell tree that he had grown from seed in a tub in the living room. Now all they saw was the book.

“This is you, yes, Mr Grey?” they said.

“No, no — that’s … my daughter, actually,” said George, and always felt that he was telling an obscure lie as he said it. But no-one would understand that the alarming S. V. Grey was—

There was a throaty tirra-lirra from the phone in the hall. George gratefully detached himself from the remains of his meal.

The hall was dark and humid, a resort for cockroaches and hairy spiders. When George picked up the phone, all that was there at first was a lot of echo and transcontinental crackle. Concentrating harder, he discovered a tinny replica of a human voice hiding somewhere in the nest of interference. It was saying, “Hello? Hello? Hello? George?”

“Who is that? … Vera?”

It was Vera, calling from three streets away. The Montedorian telephone system, like the electricity supply, was still in an experimental stage.

“What is your name?” Vera asked.

“What?”

“How — was — your — game?”

“Oh. Fine. No, just fine.”

“Who won?”

“Mm? Ah … Teddy did.”

“Always Teddy wins.”

“Yes. I’m afraid it’s his commando training.”

“Unkind fruits and bosky boots,” Vera said.

“What? I can’t hear you!” he shouted.

“I ask you if you eat your dinner.”

He was sure that she hadn’t said that.

“Yes. Vera — I suppose you wouldn’t … like to come over, would you?”

“Oh, it is so late. In the morning is a conference at the hospital. I must have sleep, George. Not tonight, I think.”

He guessed she meant that Teddy was there. “Okay,” he said.

Then Vera said: “You can come here, if you like to. Today I buy a new bottle of Chivas Regal—”

“You are a love,” George said. “No. You get your sleep. I’m feeling bushed as hell, too.”

“Perhaps tomorrow then—”

“Yes. Tomorrow. That would be nice. We can go to dinner—”

“Maybe,” Vera said. “Sleep good.”

“You sleep well, too, old love.”

“Ciao, George—”

He hung the phone back on its hook. Returning to the uneasily throbbing light of the living room, he saw S. V. Grey accusing him from the bookshelf. He swigged the last of the Dào. S. V. Grey was still there, the letters of her name glowing in red tipped with silver.

Let me know your flight number and I will meet you at Heathrow.

Moving painfully, cautious as a burglar in his own house, George shook his squash kit out of the oilcloth shopping bag and refilled it with an ironed shirt, socks, pants, razor and the old account book in which he was drafting his report to the President.

Outside, the air was warm and free of furies. A stucco archway divided George’s strip of garden from the street; beneath the arch was a tidy, man-sized parcel of rags. The loose ends of the parcel fluttered slightly in the night wind, and George stepped carefully over its least bulky end.

A hand came out of the rags.

“Por favor—” The parcel had a cracked woman’s voice.

George felt in his pocket, found a handful of escudos and laid the coins on the hand.

“Muito obrigado,” the parcel said politely.

“Boa noite,” George said.

“Obrigado, senhor.”

There was no traffic in the city. He could hear dogs, exchanging notes from the cardboard box suburbs and, somewhere out in the sky, a light aircraft was on sentry-go. The moon showed the Rua Kwame Nkruma as a picturesque ruin, its fantastic timberwork the colour of old lace.

“Não a Preguiça!” said the broken facade of Number 12; “Não a Oportunismo!”

George, taking the message personally, quickened his aching step.

Habit woke him at dawn. He had dreamed he was an astronaut, hurtling through space in a module full of clocks and gauges. Then he was driving in a golf buggy through a bumpy landscape of red moondust. There was a baby, wrapped in rags, crying under an acacia tree. He picked it up to cuddle it and it turned into something dead and heavy with an elderly stranger’s face. Vera had been in his dream as well. She had gone spacewalking, and when he called to her she was too high in the sky to hear him scream.

He looked at his watch. It wasn’t six, yet. He had always taken pleasure in the cool early morning walk through the sleepy city to the bunkering station. Today, he’d arranged to see Raymond Luis there at eleven; an age away. He was an eleven o’clock man now, at one with the distinguished visitors and the perspiring sales reps; and he saw the redundant hours laid out ahead of him like a range of steep, uninteresting hills.

Surreptitiously, he shifted first one leg, then the other. Neither hurt too badly. Vera’s body was curled away from him, lost in sleep. The springy tangle of her hair was lodged on the neighbouring pillow like a thornbush. The thin shared coverlet stirred against his own body as she breathed. George watched her through one eye, soothed by the simple bulk of her lying beside him. She gave the morning point and weight: it was today, and not just any old day, because here was Vera, her big shoulders hunched and bare, lungs and heart in A-OK order, one pink palm exposed to the encroaching sun as it leaked through the shutters and cast a pale grid of light on the wooden floor.

Vera was exactly a year older than his daughter; George treasured those twelve months as a special, secret gift. By Bom Porto standards, Vera was no chicken: the girls with whom she’d been in school were all old women now. When he’d first met Vera, he’d been shocked by the schoolfriends — their cracked faces, their shuffling walk, their trails of ragged grandchildren. They seemed older than his own mother. Standing with them, Vera looked absurdly, indecently young; but she was a year older than his daughter — that was the important thing to George.

He touched her warm haunch and felt the moistening of her nightsweat on his fingers. She shivered as if his hand had entered in disguise into her dream, and the open palm on the pillow travelled slowly, uncertainly to her hidden breast. Dear Vera. It occurred to George that he liked her best when she was asleep. Awake, there was too much of her, somehow, to allow any but qualified and complicated feelings. Asleep, she permitted him to wallow in simple tenderness and simple gratitude. Dear, dear Vera.

As quietly as he could, he slid out from Vera’s bed and tiptoed from the room, trousers in hand. Quietly, he filled her blackened kettle and quietly submerged the coffee-grinder in the bitter-smelling sack of mountain beans. A line from a schoolboy hymn stuck in his head: “Who sweeps a room as for His name makes that and the action fine”. George liked these passages of early morning housewifery. Doing things for Vera. The gas popped loudly as he put a match to it. George listened: no, she was still asleep.

Vera had two rooms — palatial space in this city where most people lived in spicy huddles like litters of kittens. Though Vera herself put one instinctively in mind of clutter, knick-knacks, overflowing laundry baskets, cornucopias, her rooms were barely colonized at all. She had accumulated a lot in the way of flesh, experience, self, but there was precious little of her when it came to things. Her clothes were kept in a single narrow closet. No skeletons there — it was less than half-full. The room at the front had a single picture on the wall, a rather nasty reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Cornfield near Aries”. There was a gaudy woollen rug on the floor, woven by Wolofs. A manual of abdominal surgery lay on top of a guide to the art treasures of Lisbon. George loved this room for its airiness: it was so hospitably empty that a single remark, a shaft of buttery sunlight or a cut flower from an embassy garden could take it over in its entirety. It was a room perfectly designed for living in the present.

Now he was grinding their breakfast coffee there, filling the room with the smell; bare feet on bare boards, winding the brass handle with a knobbly, clenched left hand, and listening to the satisfying scrunch-scrunch sound of the beans inside the mill.

He opened the mosquito door on to the loggia, and let the morning in. The jagged hills to the northwest of the city were coloured orange by the sun. The army had painted them with letters big enough to be seen by passing spacemen in their satellites: LONG LIVE AGRARIAN REFORM! LONG LIVE REVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL DEMOCRACY! LONG LIVE AMILCAR CABRAL! Below the loggia, a yellow Toyota pickup truck with a stoved-in side went past in a caul of dust. It was followed by a black solitary, shit-stained pig, out for a morning constitutional. Then came a woman, a five gallon kerosene drum almost full of water balanced on her head. The drum didn’t shift, but her eyes did: they swivelled upwards, gazing roundly at the balcony, where George felt his gaping flies.

“Bom dia,” George said.

“Bom dia,” she said, and giggled.

He watched her go on down the street, wearing the can on her head as stylishly as if it was an Ascot hat. Her disappearance round a sandy corner left the street suddenly blank; and in that emptiness, George felt a stab of panic. The present was crowding him out. For the last five minutes, he had been printing images in his head as if they were in the past. Everything — the woman, the pig, the truck, the slogans, even Vera still asleep next door, even the smell of the coffee he was still grinding — already had the sharpness of a memory. Viva! Viva! said the slogans on the hills; but this was a life he was looking back to. Framed half-naked in the mosquito door, George felt posthumous.

“George! Hey, honey, are you there?”

“Yes,” he called back, “I’m here. I’m making coffee. I’ll be with you in a moment.”