Foreign Land

CHAPTER FIVE

George watched television. He sat over it, legs wide apart, jawbone cupped in his palm, as if he was warming himself before its coloured screen. The sound was turned down low. George aimed the channel changer at the set and stabbed the button with his thumb. He was searching for — he didn’t know what. News. Intelligence.

He wanted to find out … about St Cadix … about his daughter … about his parents … about Diana Pym and the Walpoles’ Christmas party. He wanted to find England. He riffled through the pictures, each one as bright and flat as the last. There was no depth to their colour: they looked as disconnected from real life as a series of holiday postcards.

Sitting in his father’s chair, George found himself using one of his father’s favourite words to describe what he saw. It was rum. Everything to do with the TV was rum.

Even its arrival had been rum. In this country (he gathered), where people were trained to stand in line and wait for things and be grateful when they eventually turned up weeks and months late, the TV had veen delivered almost before George had properly begun to think of it. His casual call to the shop in the village had been treated as if it was a medical emergency. The van (“T. Jellaby — Every TV & Video Want Promptly Supplied”) had come, like an ambulance, in minutes.

“Where do you want him io, then?” Clasping the enormous set to his chest, Mr Jellaby was puffed and bandy legged.

Thrown by the man’s grammar, George had stared and said, “Oh … anywhere over there will do—”, pointing at the portrait of the cousin.

Jellaby connected up the equipment. “He’ll do nice here,” he said, as if the TV was a dog or a foster child. “You want the video, too?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t think so. No.”

“You get free membership of the Video Club …”

“The television’s fine — it’s all I want.”

“You’re all on your own here, are you?” Jellaby inspected the unswept room with the expert look of someone whose business is other people’s business, like a parson or a social worker. “In the Video Club we’ve got a very good selection of … adult films.” He didn’t quite wink, but his expression was unpleasantly complicit. “I’ll leave you a form anyway. So you can have a think about it.”

“Oh, please don’t bother—”

That affair had been rum enough; the stuff that George saw on the screen of the thing was rummer. Much of it was incomprehensible because the programmes kept on referring to other television programmes that George had never seen. It was like the Walpoles’ party — knowing none of the famous names, he felt ignorant and excluded. The jokes were unanswerable riddles. He watched, baffled, as a housewife on a quiz show identified six different TV series from a medley of their signature tunes. For this feat of general knowledge, she was rewarded with a twin-tub washing machine and tumble drier. Never before had George seen anyone literally jump for joy, but this woman was skipping up and down on the stage. She threw her arms round the neck of her inquisitor, wept real tears, and kissed him lavishly. George changed channels.

He watched a game of football in which England lost 3–0 to Luxembourg. An hour later, on the news, he saw the aftermath of the game: children fighting with policemen in the streets around the football stadium. The policemen advanced like ancient Greeks, behind an interlocking wall of silver riot shields; the angry children stoned them with bricks and bottles. Forty children had been arrested, eight policemen seriously injured.

He watched advertisements for kitchen units, sheep pellets, chocolate bars, home computers. He half expected to come across his own daughter’s face as he drifted from station to station. There was a programme in which people were talking about books, but Sheila wasn’t on it.

He sat through the full term (a record, for him) of a comedy show called “An Englishman’s Home”. The characters in it were supposed to be lords and ladies living on their uppers in a mouldy castle. The helicopter shot at the beginning of the programme, with its view of sculpted woods, trim parkland and old, rust coloured brick, suggested Kent. The castle was ruled by a woman called Lady Barbara, who strode round the place in a tweed skirt and padded kapok jacket of camouflage green. Every time she came on, the studio audience clapped. She could barely speak without raising a storm of appreciative laughter. At the climax of the show she blew a derelict barn to bits with dynamite. When the dust and smoke cleared, a wayward baronet was found squatting in the rubble.

“Ah, Peregrine,” said the actress playing Lady Barbara. “There you are. Sitting around on your b.t.m. as usual. Why don’t you do something useful for a change? Oh, Perry, do get on your bike!”

The audience roared. The actress turned on them with her bossy, horsey, Lady Barbara look, and they choked their laughter for just long enough to allow her to deliver her next line.

“And Peregrine!” The baronet was dusting himself down. His clothes were charred, his tie in shreds. “How many times have I told you to stop smoking?”

The audience loved this one. George was mystified. He supposed that the programme must be some sort of allegory. Or satire, perhaps. Whatever it was, it was definitely rum. For a moment he rather wished that he hadn’t thrown away that form of Jellaby’s: if one was going to get the hang of television now, perhaps one had to be a member of the Video Club.

Furry puppets jigged on the screen. George stared at them and searched his head for phrases to send to Vera.

Her letter had come by the second post. It was breathless and crowded, full of abrupt bursts of news penned out in Vera’s lovely, loopy scrawl. She missed him. Waking in the mornings, she felt lonely, sometimes. She thought of him as a tree. (Was that arvore, or some other word? George meant to look at it again.) On Tuesday, twenty millimetres of rain had fallen. She’d met the President of Guinea-Bissau. She hoped to go to the WHO conference in Washington in January. She’d found a scorpion on the balcony; the Wolof janitor from downstairs had murdered it for her with relish. The Egyptian from the World Bank had given the final OK to the building of the new road to Guia. Then she wrote: “All that I speak must sound a little bizarre, for Montedor now is very far away to you, I think.”

That wasn’t true. (A man with a woman’s lacquered hairdo was reading the news.) Africa was so close that George could graze it with his cheek. Africa was where he was whenever he forgot himself: it was the place where he slept, brushed his teeth and where he hummed “Tiger Rag” as he waited for the kettle to come to the boil. It was home. Several times in the last few days he’d noticed a lightning flicker on the extreme periphery of his vision — a house skink, tacking nervously up the wall. He’d turned his head to watch the lizard, and remembered. No skinks in St Cadix.

It was England, not Africa, that was so far away. The country was all round him, dark and mossy, littered with his parents’ ancestral junk. Yet it was like a thin charcoal smear of land on the horizon of an enormous lake. He kept on losing sight of it, and none of it seemed any nearer than the rest.

If only Vera’s apartment was as close as it felt … He longed to talk to her over a bottle of Chivas Regal parked on top of the manual of abdominal surgery, with the guttering electricity supply making candlelight around them. But what could one put in a letter? Not much.

Vera, love,

I miss you too and often forget that you aren’t here, or I’m not there. That hurts more than I had expected, but otherwise I am finding my feet and beginning to settle in-

Writing carefully, George filled two sides of lightweight onionskin. The television pictures cast an even, cold blue light on the page. When he next looked up, Lady Barbara was on. She was in jodhpurs tonight, and she was shaking a riding crop at one of the hapless noblemen in her domain.

The marine aquarium was padlocked for the winter; the three gift shops were sealed off behind rusty metal grilles. At the Lively Lobster restaurant, last season’s menu had curled in its glass frame and the handwriting on it was gone to an illegible sepia. Fore Street was frigid and unsociable. George felt marooned.

The sun was up, but it was too weak to equip him with a shadow. His footsteps, trapped between the tall, wet granite walls, sounded like axe blows.

He spotted Jellaby, out in his van making house calls. Maybe that’s what everyone was up to behind their closed doors … fighting computer wargames and watching old movies on video machines. Hardly anyone was about. The few women who had braved the street had the furtive look of trespassers with their coat lapels pulled up high round their faces as they hid from the wind.

It was the herring gulls who went about as if they owned the village: they loafed in noisy rows on gable ends, scuffled between the chimney pots and stood four square, cackling and spitting, in the middle of the road. As George passed they watched him with bloody button eyes. They knew a newcomer when they saw one: and the gulls had prehistory on their side.

George posted his letter to Vera. Listening to it slither and fall in the empty pillarbox, he wanted to recall it. The words he’d written weren’t strong enough to survive the journey. By the time they reached Vera, they’d mean something else.

The wind stung. His coat was too thin for the weather. Swinging his arms, throwing the hem of his long coat up with his knees, he began to march through the village like a stormtrooper, scattering the gulls ahead of him. Then he remembered that sea air was supposed to be a sexual stimulant. Too bad. He’d walk just the same.

He reached the quay and marched out along the breakwater, past the moored boats to the striped pepperpot lighthouse at the end, where he tried and failed to get his pipe alight. The wind was shredding the tops of the little pointed waves on the estuary. At the harbour entrance, half a mile away, big breakers were rolling in from the open Atlantic: as they hit the rocks they exploded into plumes of white powder. On the far bank the leafless trees looked rimed with hoar frost: dust from the china clay works upriver had brought a snowbound winteriness to the landscape, smearing the trees, the grass, the roads, the dark slate roofs, and blowing in twisty clouds down the long funnel of the valley. Rupert Walpole had said he was fighting “a rearguard action” against “the conservationists”; but George thought Walpole was, if anything, improving on nature. The white dust, mixed with the white spume, gave Cornwall the arresting oddity of a moonscape.

The tide was high and the end of the breakwater felt as if it was afloat. George leaned on the rail to steady himself as the sea moved all round him, lapping at his feet, busy, noisy, comforting. He liked the taste of salt spray on his lips and the dizzying sensation of being back aboard ship, feeling the bows lift to the waves and sink suddenly back.

On watch again, he studied the water. There was something very English about it, this thin, light-starved water which fizzed and splashed so much more quickly and nervously than the slower seas he had grown used to. In Bom Porto, the Atlantic was milky green, thick as soup. At this time of year it swarmed with plankton, and in certain lights you seemed to see the sea wriggle with life. It was easy to imagine the first things crawling out of it and starting in on their colonial adventure. This northern sea was different, more coldly sophisticated. If you thought about the things that came out of it, they weren’t innocent. Celtic saints with prophecies … shipwrecked sailors … wartime mines. The tidewrack that nudged and bumped against the harbour wall was full of broken fish crates, shapeless chunks of polystyrene, limp condoms like giant white tulip flowers. Well, in that respect the sea was like most things. You got out of it pretty well exactly what you put in: it returned Montedor to Montedor, England to England, as automatically as any mirror. George, watching its flecked and ruffled surface, saw too much confusion there for comfort, and turned his back on it.

Halfway along the breakwater, he stopped to look at the boats. Their mooring lines were slack in the water and they’d floated out from the quay, their hulls knocking gently together, fender to fender. They were very lightly attached to the land. The half dozen yachts were just big plastic toys; it was the fishing boats that interested him, with their scabbed paint and tangles of gear. They had good names—Excelsior, Harmony, Mystic, Faithful, Harvest Home. There was an open-hearted frankness in these names. Each one was a confession. When you were at sea you really did think about abstract, religious things — things that you never admitted to ashore. You dreamed a lot. You found yourself believing in fate, or God or a girl.

The naval ratings on Hecla, for instance. In Portsmouth, Cape Town, Mombasa, they stormed each port like Apaches. It had been a terrifying task to round them up, sodden and cursing, from the bars and brothels that they always discovered, by some instinctive radar system, within hours of docking. George, a sub-lieutenant fresh out of the Sixth Form, felt like an infant beside these hardened libertines of nineteen and twenty. Yet on night watches, ploughing up the Indian Ocean, it was the ratings who were childlike. He was touched and astonished by the questions they set him when he made the rounds of the ship.

“Do you reckon Jesus was real, sir?”

“My mum’s in Pinner. They won’t bomb Pinner, will they, sir?”

“Billington saw a ghost once, sir. Have you ever seen a ghost, sir?”

They wore St Christopher charms round their necks. Whenever the papers came on board, they raced to look up their fortunes in the stars. They spent many of their off duty hours staring at the sea with wonder in their faces, counting flying fish and looking out for monsters.

The names of the boats struck the same wondering note. George found the village itself oppressively safe and dull, but the fishing boats held out the teasing promise of another world, just around the corner from St Cadix — a realm of solitude, of meditation, of danger. He watched them crowding at their moorings: Excelsior brushed lightly past Harvest Home; the tide caught at the stern of Harmony and it sashayed across the water, its ropes lifting clear, its bow going on a private abortive quest for open sea.

“Oh, hullo there! So you’ve found Wingco’s boat!”

It was the woman from the Walpoles’ party — the one who’d known his mother. Betty-something, he thought, but wasn’t sure. Her miniature dog was squeaking and snuffling round his trouser ends.

“Stop it, Timothy! Silly dog! No! Just kick him if you want to-”

“Hullo,” George said. “Nice to see you.” She must have been following him.

“Well, what do you think? Interested?” Her birdsnest of thin hair looked as if it had been fried. It was impervious to the squalls of wind that raced across the breakwater. Beneath it, Betty Thing was as round and pink as an old-fashioned powder puff.

“Sorry — I’ve no idea which boat you’re talking about.”

“Calliope. That one there. The ketch.”

He’d taken it for a fishing boat. It was tubby, varnished, high in the bow, with a wheelhouse posted near the stern like a sentry box.

“Oh, yes,” George said. “She’s rather pretty.”

“Jolly good seaboat. Of course Wingco’s hardly used her, but when the Tremletts had her they used to take her down to Spain almost every year—” Betty Thing’s voice was drowned out by two long blasts of a ship’s horn. A coaster — Finnish, George saw — was surging downstream on the ebb tide. She was in cargo and sitting low in the water, several inches below her Winter North Atlantic line. As the ship passed, the moored boats lurched on her wake and the sea slopped over the edge of the quay.

Betty Thing said: “I believe old Mr Toms at the boatyard has the keys, if you’d like to see inside …”

“Well, actually, it really hadn’t crossed my mind to—”

“She’s solid teak and mahogany down below.” Coquettish in flamingo ski suit and poncho top, Betty Thing followed each exclamatory sentence with a little puff of breath like a blown kiss. She twinkled at George, then twinkled at the boat. “Such a waste, don’t you think? She hasn’t moved from the river in two years, poor thing. Oh, do get the keys from Toms and give her the once-over!”

“Are you on a percentage?” George said, smiling carefully to take most of the sting out of the words.

“Oh …” her face went suddenly vague. “I’m sorry. It was just an idea. You seemed such a likely person. I suppose you must think I’m a frightful busybody. I don’t usually go in for this sort of thing — that’s probably why I’m so bloody at it.” The boat drifted into the quay; its fenders sighed as it touched, then it floated out again. Betty Thing watched it as if she was wondering how to send it to the bottom.

“It’s Cynthia we all mind about. She’s had the most awful time. They haven’t got a cent left. Just … that boat. Wingco won’t hear of having her put up for sale, but if only someone came along … like you … you see?”

“What’s his real name?”

“Oh … Roy. But for godsake don’t call him that. He hates it.”

“Why’s that?”

“He’s chippy,” she said, as if it explained everything. Her dog crouched beside her, its eyes glazed with contentment as it delivered itself of a long, khaki, helical stool. George lifted his own eyes, in embarrassment, to the horizon. “My pa was a Navy man. He used to swear that some of the best officers he knew had come up through the ranks. Except that Wingco didn’t, of course, but you know what I mean—”

Through the wheelhouse window, George could see the compass, swaying slightly in its gimbals, a yellowed Daily Telegraph, the circles of tarnished brass on the wheel.

“There must be someone who wants it—” Betty Thing said.

“I thought you said the man doesn’t want to sell.”

“He has to sell. He knows it, too — it’s just his silly pride that stops him. He’ll never go out in it again. He can’t afford it. He’s ruining Cynthia’s life. We have to give her clothes on the sly, or she’d be walking round in rags.”

“I thought service pensions were quite handsome, nowadays.”

“Wingco owes thousands to the bank. He got involved in stocks and shares, you see … and he put some money into a restaurant that went bust … and then there was this boat …”

It didn’t look to George as if it was the crowning symbol of any man’s megalomania. It was too dumpy and trawlerlike. Its varnish was coming out in blisters; the coach roof was marbled with gullshit. It had the air of an abandoned house — not a grand house, but a windy cottage whose tenants had quit in the night with the rent owing and bills piling up on the mat.

“He was awfully clever, I gather. In the Air Force. Early promotion and all that. But then I suppose when he came out the lack of discipline must have gone to his head. It happens, doesn’t it, with people in the services sometimes? The man’s been going to pieces ever since I’ve known him.”

“Poor blighter,” George said, warming to the Wing Commander because he approved of the Wing Commander’s boat.

“Yes,” Betty Thing said shortly. “Though, frankly, it’s poor Cynthia as far as I’m concerned.”

“Is his stroke recent?”

“Oh, early last summer sometime. But, you see, as strokes go it really wasn’t such a bad one. Robin Rhodes said he ought to make a complete recovery from it. But we know our Wingco. He hasn’t made a blind bit of effort ever since.”

A sudden rush of wind pushed Calliope out from the quay. Her mooring ropes tightened in a spray of bright droplets. The boat shivered in the water and the fine seams between her planks caught the light. For a long teasing moment, George saw himself busy on her deck, casting off and sailing cleanly away into the blue.

“Well,” said Betty Thing with a disagreeable little smile, “I’m afraid that’s grammar schools for you. Isn’t it?”

Wing Commander and Mrs Dunnett lived at Persimmons on a hill overlooking the river to the north of the village. Alders would have been a better name for it, George thought, or Nettles. The garden gate was swollen and wouldn’t close behind him. Rain had washed away most of the steep gravel drive. The rusty frame of a dinghy trailer was sunk in the overgrowth of grass and chickweed. An old Mercedes standing aslew at the top of the drive might have been temporarily parked or permanently junked; it was hard to tell. The house itself was a straggling bungalow with Tudor beams chamfered into the brickwork. Its dark windows reflected the careless turmoil of the garden like over-exposed negatives of film.

It took a long time for Mrs Dunnett to come to the door. When she did open it, she stared, rather vaguely, over George’s shoulder as if she expected to see more of him coming up the drive.

“Oh …” she said. Then: “Oh, yes. You want to see Wingco. You’d better come in.”

The house had a married smell of cooked vegetables and unaired linen. It reminded George uncomfortably of the way that Thalassa used to smell when his father was alive. Mrs Dunnett stood in the hall of the bungalow as if it were she and not George who was a total stranger to it. She stared with bulging eyes at the front door until George closed it. Then she gazed round her as if she couldn’t quite remember in which wing of the palace she had last noticed her husband.

She was tall, with colourless skin and high cheekbones that stood out on her face like the arms of a crucifix. Her floral print dress was too vivid, too baggy and too short for her. One of Betty Whatsit’s castoffs?

“Just wait a minute, will you?” She moved all of six feet into the room nearest to her and said, “Your man’s here, Wingco,” then to George, “Yes, he’s through there …”

George followed her in to the room.

“Oh, hullo — good of you to come,” said the wing commander from his armchair. He was small, pink and swaddled like a baby. The left half of his face was stiff; the right half smiled, showing teeth too white and regular to be real.

“Cold, isn’t it, Mister … I don’t know your name,” Mrs Dunnett said.

“Grey.”

“Grey.” Then she said “grey” again, this time as if it was a description of his character rather than his name. “Do you take sugar with your tea?”

“No thanks, I don’t.”

“Oh, well that’s all right,” she said, and breezed from the room.

“Sorry,” Dunnett said. “I can’t get up. At least I can, but …” He nodded at the open door. “Do … ah … ah …” he waved his right hand limply at a chair. “Old Toms called me. Said you’d looked over the boat.”

“Yes,” George said. “She’s very pretty.”

“No speed in her, of course. Won’t tack. But she’s what I call a gentleman’s yacht. Not like all those Tupperware things …”

“Would you like to sell her?”

“Oh …” Dunnett was watching the door. “Well she’s not up for sale, you know,” he said in a voice designed to carry. “We’re still thinking of upping sticks in her next summer. Going down to the Med. Or the Caribbean. My wife has friends in Florida. If only this—” he jerked his left hand—“would ease up a bit, we could be off.” He said orf, but it sounded unnatural in his mouth, as if he’d been taking elocution lessons from his wife.

“I envy you,” George said, thinking how relieved he was to be himself and not the wing commander. The man must be his own age; he realized that he’d been thinking of him as if he was of the same generation as his father.

“Given a stretch of decent weather … with the trade winds and everything … if the medicos gave one a clean bill of health … assuming one could find a buyer for the house … and put all one’s stuff in storage …” Dunnett was adding unlikelihood to unlikelihood with the air of a child building a house of cards for the sheer pleasure of seeing it collapse. “Do you know Florida?”

“No, I’ve never been there.”

“Nor me. Dreadfully hot in the summer, I gather. Moonrockets and Disneyland and all that.” He made a chirruping sound of disbelief.

“And you’d sail all the way?” George said, plugging his advantage.

“Well … I suppose … if things panned out …”

Mrs Dunnett brought in tea on a tray. The silver pot looked ancestral, the china looked as if it might be Spode; but there was a bottle of milk in place of a jug, and the tray had smears of marmalade on it.

“I’m off to St Austell,” Mrs Dunnett said.

“Oh …” For a moment the wing commander showed the fright of a toddler abandoned in a crowd on a station. Then the stiff side of his face moved slightly. “Yes. Drive carefully, darling, won’t you—”

George, awkwardly on his feet, said: “Goodbye, Mrs Dunnett.”

She stared at him as if he’d said something original. “Goodbye.”

“You’d better be Mother,” Dunnett said to George as she left. Pouring the tea, George heard the Mercedes start outside. Its exhaust must have been broken: the engine was making a snarling noise like a tank. The car roared down the drive. He heard it pause, straining, at the gate, then roar down the hill towards St Cadix.

“Cynthia loves the sea,” Dunnett said, as if this somehow accounted for the sound of the car.

“Milk?” George said.

“Oh … would you? Thank you so much.”

Above his head, George noticed a shelf solid with the faded scarlet spines of a row of Debrett’s and Burke’s. The most recent volume was a Debrett’s for 1934. He supposed that Mrs Dunnett must be listed in it somewhere. She must have been Somebody’s daughter.

“I’m afraid I’ve always been too much of an airman to like the sea very much. Didn’t even like flying over it. I get mal de mer very easily. Tried all the pills. None of them seems to work. I always manage to end up with my head stuck over the lee side …”

“Yes,” George said, “it’s flying that does that to me.”

“Same with Cynthia. She hates the air. I suppose it’s not really given to most of us to be at home in more than one element. I’m air; Cynthia’s sea. Ironic really, when you think about it.”

George said: “I was in the Navy for a bit — and since then I’ve always had to do with ships.”

“Betty Castle said something about that, yes. You know her, of course. She’s been an absolute brick to us, you know. Heart of gold.”

“Yes,” George said, and thought, poor sod.

“She’s been awfully good with Cynthia …” The wing commander looked across at George, fishing for some sort of knowing response.

“Has she—?”

“Oh, marvellous. Marvellous. Cynthia’s in so much better shape than she was. Without Betty, I can’t think what we’d have done. She’s been a pillar to both of us.” He carried his teacup carefully to his mouth. It wobbled badly, and tea splashed the travelling rug in which the wing commander had been wrapped.

“I’m going to have to watch my step, you know,” he said. “When I do sell the boat. It was bought for Cynthia, really. Only I turned out to be such a ruddy awful sailor.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t sell it,” George said.

“No choice. Look at me … And then there’s the simple matter of the L.s.d. involved: it’s rotten for Cynthia, all this — she’s not used to having to count pennies.”

“I don’t want to make things more difficult for you.”

“Frankly, old boy, you’ll be taking a millstone from round our necks. I sometimes think that if only I’d had a bit more bottle in me, I should have scuttled the thing for the insurance money long ago …” The good side of Dunnett’s face contracted into a small, unhappy smile. “I knew a chap who did that once. Got clean away with it. Nobody said a word.”

“We had quite a bit of it where I was in Africa. It was supertankers there, usually. There’s a spot just off Liberia where the continental shelf is only five miles out. You can leave the ship in seven hundred fathoms of water and have a pleasant row ashore. Lots of people do it. It’s a profitable way of spending an afternoon.”

“Yes,” said Dunnett. “But I’d be the charlie who gets caught.”

“Well I suppose most of us think that. Luckily for the world. But it’s astonishing how many of the real charlies don’t get caught.”

“You’d … like to buy the boat—” Dunnett’s voice was anxious, papery.

“What are you asking for her?”

“Oh … I loathe talking about money. I don’t know. Whatever she’s worth. Say … oh, heavens … twenty thousand?”

“I couldn’t possibly. Not at that price.”

“What were you thinking of?” The wing commander’s baby pinkness was draining from his face.

“I did try asking around. Toms said eleven. Someone else said twelve. Rupert Walpole said he thought about ten. That seemed the general range.”

“Could we — perhaps — do you think? — say … eleven?” “Hadn’t you better call in some second opinions for yourself?”

“No, no, no — this is an arrangement between gentlemen—”

The Peerage, the Baronetage, the Knightage and the Landed Gentry crowded in as witnesses to the deal.

“Well, if you’re sure about that, Wing Commander—”

“Oh …” Dunnett said, disclosing his dentures, “do call me Roy.”

George was woken by a slanting beam of watery sunlight. Lying spreadeagled in his parents’ lumpy bed, he felt weightless and hyper-alert, like a cosmonaut on a spacewalk. His first thought was that this must be an attack of the mild, rather enjoyable tropical fever that sometimes visited him as a reminder of his luck in dodging the crazy shakes of malaria. George’s fevers took the form of extended bursts of elation. They lasted for forty-eight hours at most. He sweated a lot. Writing, he found his hands skidding out of control across the page. Simple things struck him as vivid and particular.

He reached for the plastic bottle of Evian water on the bedside table and took a long swig from it. He touched his forehead. It was dry and cool. So it wasn’t fever. George blinked, stretched, wriggled his toes; content in himself for the first time in many weeks. It had been a hell of a long time since he’d last felt his spirits rise with the sun.

In the narrow gap between the flowered curtains, he could see the mouth of the estuary — the colour of bronze, as smooth as treacle. The depression, which had come swirling in from Iceland, had turned north and headed up to the Baltic, leaving Cornwall rinsed and shining. Much the same sort of thing seemed to have happened to George’s depression. It was, to his amazement, gone.

Well? And wasn’t it a liberating notion — as exciting in its way as a perfectly planned burglary, or one of those insurance rackets that tantalized old Dunnett? Buying the boat would be an exchange … a transfusion. Good blood for bad. Calliope for Figuera. Just being able to phrase the name to himself was new. Pleased and surprised, George toasted himself in Evian water.

Figuera.

It was a name attached to a locked room on the attic floor of George’s head. He always did his best to avoid passing it. Occasionally, on an incautious and forgetful ramble, he came face to face with the room, and averted his eyes from the door. Sometimes the room’s contents appeared to him, in disguise, in bad dreams.

How extraordinary to be able to think it this morning. Figuera. Figuera. Just like that.

The curfew had begun, and George had hurried home through streets empty except for the Portuguese soldiers in their armoured cars. When he reached his apartment, the phone was ringing. Its querulous, scolding note made it sound as if it had been pealing unanswered for a very long time.

“George?”

The line was terrible.

“Is that … Teddy?”

“Sure is, baby.”

“Teddy! You old bastard — how are you? Where are you? Still in Angola?”

“George …”

“Oh, sorry.”

“I’m fine. I’m in a bar.”

George thought he could hear the whooping laughter of the drinkers through the crackle.

“Listen, George … We may get cut off … One question. You know that Pan-African shipping convention in Lagos next month?”

“Yes. I’m going there.”

“You are? That’s great, George. Great—”

“Will you be there?”

“Me? No, I’m not going. But you’re sure you can make it?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Fantastic. That’s all I wanted to know.”

“Shall I … see anyone there that I know?”

“Yeah,” Teddy laughed. “A lot of goddam shipping bores. Anyway, what’s happening there?”

“Nothing much. The odd demo. The curfew’s getting irksome.”

“Tough shit.”

“Teddy?” But the connection had been broken. There was nothing on the line except a lot of bronchial rattles and wheezes.

He flew to Lagos with a small splinter of anxiety lodged somewhere in his mind. At the convention, he loitered for a while in the emptying hall at the end of the first plenary session. Each time he went back to his hotel he asked if there were any messages for him. Boyce of Mombasa wanted a drink; Ashworth of Freetown proposed lunch. No word from Teddy or his friends. The convention dragged. George ached to be back at work.

On the fifth day, just a few hours before his plane was due to leave, he found out why Teddy had called him in the night. It was in the Lagos Times. The Figuera, a Portuguese naval patrol vessel, had been sunk. She had fuelled in Bom Porto. Twelve hours out, a series of explosions had torn her apart. Nine crew members, including the captain, were missing, presumed dead. There was a photograph of the survivors — men wrapped in blankets, stepping ashore from a Swedish ship in Dakar. Another blotchy picture showed the bunkering station.

George, staring at the paper, felt first fury, then contempt. Teddy was a shit, a lying bastard and a bloody fool. He felt betrayed by his friend. How could he do this to me? Then, as no more than a guilty afterthought, he pitied the drowned sailors; the sea set alight, the broken ship going down.

It had always been understood. The bunkering station was out of the quarrel. It was like an independent state, a tiny Switzerland. The military governor accepted that. So did Aristide Varbosa. George was probably the only man in the entire country who enjoyed the trust of both sides in a war of small atrocities and dirty skirmishes. Now that trust was destroyed by this vicious, infantile piece of terrorism.

He flew back to Montedor, raging over every slow mile of the flight. He was too angry to eat or drink. He sat in First Class, scattering spent matches on the floor as he lit and relit his pipe and tried to learn the strange new language of scorn and dislike for Eduardo Duarte.

The military governor was a shy man. He had a bad complexion and looked scuffed like his uniform. His questions to George came out sounding like apologies.

“It is an appalling thing,” George said; “a disaster for the country.”

“I have to hold myself responsible. It was a simple failure of security.”

“Even so, they know that it’s in their own interests to—”

“This is not a football game. It is our job to protect our troops.”

“The only reason I’ve been able to keep the station running is because both you and the PAIM people have honoured the idea that it cannot ever be treated as either a target or a base. You know I have friends on both sides,” George said, wondering quite what it was that he wanted to confess.

“Of course. That is necessary. I understand that.”

George did not mention the telephone call. The last thing on his mind was any desire to shield Duarte. It was his own stupidity he was trying to hide: how could he have been so dim as to fail to see that it was his absence from Bom Porto, not his presence in Lagos, that Duarte had been checking?

The patrol boat dropped out of the news. The Creole day foreman was held in detention, along with six other of George’s men. There were rumours of torture; George was careful not to listen too closely.

Six months later, the Portuguese left. Varbosa was President of the Republic; Duarte was Minister of Highways. George stayed on at the bunkering station. After a few stiff weeks and two painful lunches, Duarte slipped back into being Teddy again. He was simply too funny to hate, George decided. And he was the only person that George knew in the city who could play squash.

If only things had rested there.

In December 1975, Teddy had produced a piece of paper in the bar of the Club Nautico and asked for George’s signature in triplicate. “Mr President requests,” he said.

“Why?”

“Oh, George, you know about the bullshit of office. Soon we’re going to be as bureaucratic as Egyptians. We black folks just love paperwork, honky.”

George signed.

A month later, they were leaving the club when Teddy opened the lapel of George’s white alpaca jacket and slipped an envelope into his pocket. “From the President’s office,” he said. George waited until he was home before he opened it.

The letter began “Honourable Sir” and named him as a loyal friend of the Republic of Montedor. Enclosed was an official-looking slip of paper, soon deciphered. It listed the number of a bank account in Carouge, Switzerland, and showed a bilan courant of $41,324.60. George felt a giddying rush of nausea and panic.

“Don’t be ridiculous—” he told Teddy the next evening.

“It’s not me, man,” Teddy said. He had just rechristened the Rua Marítima the Rua Fidel Castro, and had taken to going everywhere in his old faded-blue battledress.

“I don’t care who it is. You know I can’t take it.”

“You can’t take money from the government? Since when? You are a government employee now, George.”

“Not this money.”

“Your Christmas bonus. Listen, I know what you’re thinking. It has nothing at all to do with that gunboat. Nothing. I swear. By the Virgin and the holy saints, OK?”

“Patrol boat,” George said. “It was a fishery protection vessel.”

“Whatever. But I tell you, George. There’s no way you can give it back. You try talking to the President, you make a big insult to the government. Varbosa tries to pay you a tribute, not a big one, for your work in this country; you are going to throw it back in his face, huh? Because you are still angry over one operation of PAIM in four years of revolution?”

“I don’t take dash,” George said.

“It’s not dash, George. Anyway, it’s not a question of taking it. It’s there. It’s in your name. Varbosa himself can’t write a cheque on that account.”

“I don’t want it.”

“So give it to the birds.”

The more George thought about it, the more lonely the money made him feel. It made him feel a foreigner in the only place that he’d ever felt really at home. Had he been in England, the whole business would have been transparently offensive and absurd. Here, no-one could see his point. Not Teddy. Not even Vera. He didn’t dare mention it to Humphreys, who would have been scandalized by the story.

He buried the bank slip at the bottom of the inlaid Adeni chest, but the gross particularity of the figures stuck in his head. He tried translating them into other currencies, but they didn’t come near to adding up to a round sum in escudos, pounds, francs or marks. Roubles, maybe? Cuban pesetas? Whatever previous life those dollars had lived, George knew for sure that it was a disreputable one.

Twice a year, a letter came from the bank in Carouge. George threw them away unopened. He could feel the untouched money slowly growing behind his back. As the interest on it accumulated, so did the percentage on his embarrassment. He was ashamed of himself. Lying alone in the small hours, he pictured the Figuera ablaze, the slick of black oil staining the sea, the ballooning liferafts.

In 1980 he was in Geneva for three days. The OPEC Oil Ministers’ Conference had bred a swarm of satellite conferencelets, and George was delegated to one of these in order to lobby the representative from Curaçao. Driving his rented car back to Perdita Monaghan’s cavernous apartment in Vevey, he saw a sign saying CAROUGE 7km. It was still early afternoon: the banks would be open, Perdita was out for the day, the dreadful Fergus was in, as usual. George had time to kill. He took the turning.

The bank was a small one, in a shopping precinct off the main road. George gave his name and the account number to a teller who went away and busied himself at a computer terminal. He came back with a printed slip. $63,137.48. It wasn’t quite as much as George had feared it might be. He withdrew $500 and spent twenty minutes in the boutiques on the shopping precinct, where he bought a rainbow dressing gown, a miniature Japanese camera and a pair of Italian swimming trunks.

It didn’t work. The furies evidently weren’t going to be appeased by these daft offerings. At the thought of his pile of dirty money in Carouge, George still felt leaden.

The dressing gown got left behind in the closet of Fergus’s room. A week later, the camera was stolen in Bom Porto, from the front seat of a landrover. George wore the trunks once. They made him look as if he was sporting a scarlet codpiece. Vera lay in the sand and laughed.

“Wowee!” she rolled her eyes in mocking pantomime. “Hey, you been keeping something from me, George?”

He shucked off the trunks and splashed naked in the surf. Vera watched the bay for sharks.

Fifteen months later he went to Geneva again. He avoided the road to Carouge, but dreamed of the Figuera. In his dream the sea was empty, flat and sunlit: a captain’s braided hat floated on the water. George tried to snare it with a boathook; it bobbed away out of reach.

Figuera.

Extraordinary. The locked door was wide open, the room empty.

There was a prolonged warning blast from a ship on the estuary. A rusty Panamanian coaster was moving upriver through the pool, dragging its wake behind it like a giant flared skirt. The small boats tipped and slithered on their moorings. As the wake hit them, their reflections shattered. The coaster cruised slowly past the window, a thuggish pike in a pond of minnows. In the still air, the frosted trees on the hills across the water looked etched on glass.

Struggling into his old trousers, George was already full of his trip. He’d take Sheila to lunch, then fly to Geneva. He loved plans, tickets, timetables — all the engrossing paraphernalia of being off and away. He was looking forward — even to the aeroplane, he realized. It made a blessed, unexpected change from looking back. He wanted to husband this new mood, as if it was a precious fluid that could easily evaporate if handled carelessly.

Hugging his good humour, he climbed down the stairs, stooping hunchbacked under the low beams. His parents’ cottage had been built for Celtic dwarfs. There was altogether too much of George to fit it — too many knees and elbows, too alpine a skull. Feeling clumsy and oversized he filled the kettle in the gingerbread kitchen and padded off to look up the number of the railway station. His bare feet stung on the cold slate. It was like the floor of a church; there was something echoing and ancient in its soapy smoothness. His dim ancestors looked very dusty this morning. The sun showed up cracks and coagulations of old paint that he’d never noticed before. The Gainsborough really was a dreadful daub; the cousin’s right hand looked like a piece of meat and, in this light, she had acquired a severe squint. For the first time, it occurred to George that the ancestors were his. He could do with them what he liked now. The cousin, for a start, could go to Oxfam. That was a cheering thought. Yes. Sheila could take anything she wanted, then he could dispose of his dead family one by one in jumble sales. How much lighter life would be without them. How long they had outstayed their welcome. How richly they deserved their marching orders.

Listening to the double burr of the phone ringing at St Austell station, George served notice on his forebears and hummed “Tiger Rag”, keeping time on the slate floor with his bare toes.