Foreign Land

CHAPTER SIX

The moment the taxi turned left and crossed the river George was lost.

He’d always prided himself on knowing his way pretty well around London: he kept a useful map of the place lodged in his head on which the city was painted as a string of brightly coloured districts. On the extreme right-hand side there was the area around Charing Cross, where you went to shows and rummaged around for secondhand books. Then there was Soho, where you ate. The bit in the middle was where you did general shopping. To the left of that there was St James’s, where you put up, and where you bought shoes and shirts and stuff. Then there was a stretch of green, before Knightsbridge began. George had always felt protruberantly male in Knightsbridge. When he was married, it had been Angela’s territory and it was still somehow wife-coloured: expensive, over-scented, peopled with voices shouting endearments at each other. After Knightsbridge, there were just People’s Houses; miles of high, white stucco, like an enormous cake. George had nibbled at the icing there, always at the invitation of friends of Angela’s. The edges of the map were marked by gothic railway stations — platforms on which, for some reason, you were always saying goodbye and getting onto a train and never getting off one and saying hullo.

This was right off the map. It seemed to be off the taxi driver’s map too. When George gave the man Sheila’s address, he’d said, “It’ll be three quid over what it says on the meter, mate. And no complaints afterwards …”

“It’s only … Clapham,” George said.

“Bloody Brixton, more like. Most drivers, they’d turn you down flat. I would myself. Only I’ve stopped now, en’t I?”

He had driven on for a hundred yards, then, without turning his head, he shouted through the partition: “Woman, is it?”

“My daughter,” George said stiffly.

“Women.” The driver pronounced the word wimmin and made it sound like the name of an affliction like piles or eczema. Wimmin, according to the driver, never told the truth about where they lived. If they lived in Kilburn, they always called it Hampstead; if they lived in Earls Court, they always said South Kensington.

“Now it’s all bloody Clapham! Don’t matter where they live, do it? Streatham, Tooting, Tulse Hill, Balham … they all say Clapham. Lah-di-fuckin’-dah!”

George stared out of the window, blocking his ears to the stream of the driver’s provocative abuse. They were passing through a part of London that he’d never seen — never even imagined to exist. It was the grubby midway hour between afternoon and night, and the landscape was dotted with smoky fires in old petrol drums. Derelict men and women stood round them, their faces reddened by the flames. A church went by. Its windows had been boarded over, and the porch had been demolished, leaving a hole in the building big enough for trucks to drive in and out between the altar and the street. A painted sign said WINSTON’S BUDGET RENTAVAN.

It looked a lawless country. The blocks of workers’ flats were dirtier, more sprawled and raggedy, than those of Accra and Dar Es Salaam; there was more trash blowing in the streets than there was in Lagos. Everywhere there were slogans, spraygunned on walls, signboards, standing sheets of corrugated iron. KILL THE PIGS HEROIN EAT SHIT FUCK THE GLC. George thought sadly of the innocent VIVAs of Montedor; no-one seemed to want anything to live long here.

Held up at a stoplight, the cab grumbled in neutral beside a petshop. In whitewashed lettering on its window, the shop promised budgerigars, kittens, rabbits, dogmeat, guppies, goldfish. It was hardly bigger than a lock-up stall, and its lighted window was opaque with steam, but it stood out in the landscape; a lonely monument to things that were warm, friendly, smaller than the human. Up there in the tower blocks, above this dead air that tasted of iron filings and burned tyre rubber, people were keeping kittens and knitting winter coats for dogs. Very rum.

George leaned forward. “Where are we now?”

“This? Lambuff. Souf Lambuff Road.”

“Oh.” To George the name had always meant a bishop’s palace and a jolly sort of dance called the Lambeth Walk.

Encouraged by George’s question, the driver settled himself comfortably into another contemptuous tirade. The one-way system was, he said, a piece of stupid shit. He cursed all drivers of all private cars. A West Indian in dreadlocks elicited such a rain of bored obscenity that George tried to close the sliding glass between himself and the man. It was jammed open with a wooden wedge. The man was as inexorable as God’s wrath.

At a zebra crossing, an elderly woman in a caliper hobbled slowly in front of the headlights. “Get a fuckin’ move on, shagbag!” the driver said, and made her jump with a blast of the horn. It was as if his anger supplied the motive power for the taxi: fuelled with expletives, it dodged, braked, slewed, cut in. With every gear change there was another burst of filth from the driver. “Wet fart!” he shouted. “Wanker!” “You tit!” “You fuckin’ toerag!”

George, quailing in the back of the cab, lit his pipe.

“Can’t you fuckin’ read?”

“What?”

“No smoking! I don’t give a shit if you want to kill yourself, mate; you go ahead. Get fuckin’ cancer. But don’t you poison my lungs with your fuckin’ smoke — okay?”

Unable to speak, reddening with rage, George pocketed his pipe. Suddenly he was as angry as everyone else in South Lambeth. He boiled in silence; hating the driver, hating the cab, hating the traffic, hating the tower blocks and the bad air and the slow, ugly endlessness of the city as it repeated itself for mile after mile without a landmark. As the darkness thickened, it seemed part of the geography of the place: south of the river, into the dark. He was sure that he was being driven in wide circles, and twice spotted the same pillar of squashed cars rising over a gaping wall of corrugated iron to prove it.

Crouched low in his seat, he tried to get a view of the sky: if only he could get a fix on a star, he could keep tabs on where he was being taken. But the only lights up there were the windows of the flats. As the taxi lurched on through the traffic, they revolved over his head like constellations.

In Africa, George had tried to keep up with the news from Britain. He read the International Herald Tribune as often as he could find a copy, and subscribed to the Weekly Guardian. It had been with disbelief that he’d read of how suspected IRA men, held in detention in Northern Ireland, had mounted what they called the Dirty Protest. These men had expressed their indignation against the government by turning themselves into giant babies. They didn’t wash. They threw their food on the floor and ate it in their hands. They practised incontinence and daubed the walls of their cells with their own excrement. Sitting, out of the sun, in the Rua Kwame Nkruma, George had followed this story as if he was reading up on the customs of some remote and terrifying tribe. In Britain? Surely not.

Yet this new London looked like a dirty protest. It was wrecked and smeared. The taxi driver, fouling the air with words, was part of it. He was only saying what all the slogans said. I hate it here. I’m innocent. It’s not my fault.

And where on earth did Sheila fit? George had meant only to take her to lunch at Wheeler’s, where he could have been comfortably in command. On the phone, though, it had been Sheila who took control. There was no question of lunch — she was working all day, anyway. But he must stay the night, at least. “Father, really-” She loaded the word with meanings: it was at once a call to duty, an appeal to common reason, even an exasperated declaration of affection. George had laughed. Holding the receiver to his ear, doodling an embroidered rectangle round the phone number of Swissair in London, he was game. But he hadn’t bargained on this dreadful place. Sheila is at home here?

Labouring in third gear, the taxi climbed a ribbed hillside of low brick terraces. The traffic was thinner now: there were sooty plane trees at the side of the road and lighted grocery stores on the street corners. The tower blocks were sinking fast behind. Soon they were no bigger than obelisks in a neglected graveyard. George looked down over the brow of the escarpment and saw the city rendered suddenly harmless by distance and the dark — a dim, untidy scatter of lights across a valley floor. He thought he could make out the black threadline of the river and the amber glow of floodlights at Westminster, puzzlingly near at hand.

At this altitude, even the driver’s manner softened. “Inker-man Rise? That’s off Acre Lane somewhere, en’t it, mate?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Yeah …” He was working it out. “It’s after Sebastopol and Alma.”

Brick gave way to cheesy stucco, plane trees to chestnuts and beeches. The air began to smell like air again. The houses began to look like real London houses, frowning and beetle browed with their heavy cornices and balustrades.

George cuddled Vera’s old patchwork oilcloth shopping bag on his lap, trying to cushion the wine against the jolting of the taxi and keep it warm. It was a ’71 Leoville-Barton, and George had spent a long time in conference with the wine merchant on St James’s Street before he’d bought it. The bottle had cost him as much as a whole case of ordinary claret. He hoped that Sheila would recognize it as a serious treat. But then Sheila appeared on television now; she was bound to know things like that. George felt that the wine struck just the right note. It was expensive. It was thoughtful. It would be gone in an hour. The trouble with most gifts was that they hung around accusingly long after the moment they’d been designed to celebrate had passed. He’d gone to the shop to buy champagne, but had been seduced by the colour of the old clarets, their sombre dustiness, and had thought how well they seemed to fit, somehow, with the idea of him and Sheila.

The taxi stopped, its motor stuttering loudly in the quiet street. George overpaid the driver, who pocketed the money without thanks and drove off, leaving him alone in the dark with the trees making sea noises overhead. He couldn’t see the numbers on the houses, which were set a little back from the road, their front doors at the tops of fanlike flights of steps. Then he spotted Sheila’s — knowing it by instinct from the light in the tall curtainless window and the bare timber door from which the paint had been freshly stripped. Before climbing the steps, he patted his pocket to make sure his pipe was there, straightened his tie and squared his shoulders. Steady the Buffs, George thought, Steady the Buffs.

He kissed her quickly to cover his surprise. For the woman at the door, his daughter, was already old. Her hair, brushed straight back from her face, was thickly streaked with silver. She looked like a badger disturbed at the entrance to her sett. He felt her arms grip him tight for a moment then spring away. Her hair smelled of apples.

“God, you feel icy,” Sheila said. “Is that all you’ve brought? You are travelling light nowadays, Father.”

She was staring at Vera’s bag. Myopia made her eyes look naked. George mumbled about how one could go a long way on a spare shirt and a clean pair of socks.

“I always remember you with pyramids of matching pigskin cases. I could never imagine what you must have put in them. Old newspapers was what I rather suspected.”

To explain his bag would mean explaining Vera. Instead, George said: “Yes, I used to cart far too much stuff around with me in those days.”

She led him into an airy, pale, high-ceilinged room. Evidently there were builders in the house: it smelled pleasantly of pine shavings and turpentine, and a builder’s man with a spirit level was standing in front of a wall of books. George, keen to make himself agreeable, nodded at the man, who responded with a silent half-moon of a smile, produced from somewhere deep inside his beard.

“Father, this is Tom,” Sheila said. “Father’s living out of a carrier bag—”

Now the man gazed at the bag, with big slow eyes. After a long moment he said, “That’s … economical.” George realized that he wasn’t from the builders. Yet he was hardly more than a boy — an enormous boy, taller and wider than George, built to the proportions of someone designed to stand on a plinth in a civic square.

The man — the boy — Tom — said, “You look just like Sheila. When you came in together like that, it knocked me out. Sheila never said.”

George, flushing, said, “Oh — Sheila’s supposed to take after her mother.”

“No,” Tom said, “it’s two peas. Anyone would see it.”

“Rubbish,” said Sheila. “Father, do take off your coat.”

Clumsy under Tom’s gaze, George shrugged his way out of his overcoat. Sheila took it from him. Moving abruptly, in her tweed skirt and brown mohair jumper, she looked all the more badgerlike and wary. George barely dared to stir for fear of startling her.

“What a lovely house,” he said. “It seems all height and space.”

“That’s Tom,” said Sheila. “It was a horrid little warren of partitioned boxes when I bought it. Tom knocked all the walls out.”

“If it was in Italy, they’d probably call it a palazzo.”

“Well, they certainly don’t call it that in Clapham Park,” Sheila said.

The table at the end of the room was laid for three. Two bottles of supermarket Dão stood on it, their corks already pulled to let them breathe. Numbly, George realized that his Leoville-Barton was hopelessly extravagant and pretentious. He couldn’t bring it out now. He’d have to keep it hidden, in the bag. Why was it that with Sheila he always seemed to end up doing the wrong thing?

Tom, George gathered, was doing the cooking. When he left for the kitchen, George felt marooned in the room with his daughter. Sheila sat at the end of a long sofa, her legs tucked up under her; George sat in a basketwork chair that creaked loudly every time he moved.

“Was Christmas hell?” Sheila asked.

The ten-foot space of air between them was brittle, crackly. George was disconcerted by his daughter’s eyes. They didn’t blink.

“No. No, not at all—” He’d watched television, then tried to read Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus. After that he’d got a little drunk on Chivas Regal and thought a lot about Vera.

“So your friends weren’t so bad after all?”

“Oh — we managed to muddle along quite well really.” Two weeks before Christmas, he’d told Sheila on the phone that he was doomed to spend it with some octogenarian friends of his mother’s who could not be disappointed so near to the date. Out of respect for his fiction, he added: “Considering the difference in our ages.”

“I tried ringing you on Christmas Day, and then I remembered.”

That was odd. He’d been in all the time. The phone hadn’t rung. He said to Sheila: “No. I stayed two nights there. Didn’t get back till Boxing Day.” He felt distinctly cheered at catching Sheila out in her lie while keeping his own intact.

“And is it all right in Cornwall? Have you met lots of people now?”

“Oh — lots,” George said. “Yes …” Under interrogation, he twisted his head and gazed at a wall which was blank except for two very small framed watercolours. His daughter’s following stare was so intent that he felt scorched by it. Feeling that he was now obliged to concede something to Sheila, he said, “Of course, it takes a while to get the hang of things.” It felt as if there was an obstruction the size of a golf ball in his larynx.

The trouble was that every time George looked up at Sheila he came face to face with S. V. Grey. Sitting on her sofa in her tall house on the hill, her long neck craned questioningly forward, she looked just like the photo on the back of her book. There was the same startled candour in her eyes, the same doubtful and ironic cast to her mouth. You would take her for someone who’d looked long and hard at the world and hadn’t been able to credit the nonsense that she’d seen there. That was S. V. Grey to a T, with her knuckle-cracking logic and her alarming reputation for being witty — a reputation so powerful that it had spread even among people who watched television in Cornwall.

Now George feared that the wit was being covertly exercised on him. But with Sheila it was so hard to tell when she was being witty and when she wasn’t. George felt it was the safest course to assume that everything she said was witty until it was proved otherwise. So when Sheila said, “Do you feel at home yet, Father, or does it all still seem an awful wrench?” he looked at her cunningly and tried to read the small print of the question in her face. Finding none there, he blustered lamely about how he’d always kept a foot in both camps anyway, you know, and how one did try to keep up, even in Bom Porto, and on one’s leaves and so forth … He only managed to finish the sentence by lighting his pipe and hiding behind a lot of tricky business with his tamping thumb and his matches.

Sheila said, “But there must be things about England … things we’re blind to because we’ve lived here too long. You’re bringing a fresh eye to the place—”

A maroon flare went off inside George’s head. He thought he detected a pretty obvious sarcasm there.

“It has to be an interesting time for you, now, Father.”

He stared at her. She seemed to be in earnest. His first thought was of the hideous valley below Sheila’s window, and of how high-caste Indians were supposed to be blind to the way their own streets were used as lavatories; but he rejected it as a dangerous line to pursue. Then he thought of that programme on TV—“An Englishman’s Home”. He would have liked talk about that; its air of snobbish self-congratulation, and the way it seemed to him so parochial and so unfunny. But Sheila had been on television, and people who were on it didn’t watch it, he supposed. If he let on that he’d seen practically everything from breakfast time till closedown, and was rapidly learning the names of all the “personalities”, he would expose himself on a very vulnerable flank.

So he said, “Actually I’ve been so busy, I’ve hardly had time to look over my own shoulder so far,” and instantly was sorry for saying it; Sheila’s question deserved more, but the more was something that George simply couldn’t give. Wanting to make it up to her, he shifted in his creaking chair so that he could study the two little watercolours on the wall. They were pictures of people in streets, done in quick dabs and splashes of paint, as if the artist was racing to keep up with the life he was trying to record. George thought they were pretty good. Regretfully he abandoned hope of ditching the ancestors on Sheila: someone who liked these deft and lively paintings would detest those oppressive slabs of Victorian journeywork.

“Gwen John,” Sheila said.

He’d meant to praise the pictures, but the name silenced him. He wasn’t sure who Gwen John was. He thought he’d heard of her, but hadn’t a clue as to whether she was alive or dead.

“Ah,” George said, temporizing warily.

“Sister to the famous Augustus.” Sheila laughed.

George laughed too. He didn’t know why he was laughing, but Sheila’s tone of voice had been ironical — he was certain of that.

Feeling his ground as he went, he said: “In Cornwall I’m lumbered with your grandfather’s hideous taste for dead archdeacons and major generals. There’s an especially awful dead maiden aunt, too.”

“Oh, those—” Sheila said. “That’s odd, I thought you must have rather liked them.”

“Good God, no.” It was like finding oneself accused of interfering with small boys in public parks.

“Granny hated them too.”

“Are you sure?” It struck George as a novel idea: in his experience, his mother had meekly followed his father’s taste in everything from his high churchmanship to his loathing of garlic. They only bickered, late in life, about each other’s illnesses.

“Yes. When she was alone in the house, after your father died, she used to cover them up. She told me.”

“Why on earth didn’t she chuck the things out, then?”

“But she wanted to leave them to you.”

“Really?”

“‘They’ll be so important to George when he comes home.’”

The words hit on a tender spot. He felt not pain but a nasty stab of what a dentist would have called “discomfort”. How badly he’d known his mother; how badly she’d known him.

“Now you’re going to find it really difficult to give them to Oxfam,” Sheila said.

“Yes — damn right I will.”

Troubled, he gazed at his daughter’s room; its coloured rugs spread on bare wooden boards, its books, its almost empty walls. Sheila’s house had the air of a place where there was nothing that wasn’t wanted and intended. It was the exact opposite of Thalassa.

“So what will you do with them, do you think?”

George looked enviously at the acreage of white plaster around the two small watercolours.

“Oh … leave them to you, I expect.”

For the first time, Sheila smiled; a frank and easy smile without a trace of wit in its corners. In an instant that lasted no longer than the blink of a camera shutter, George thought: it’s true — we’re related.

From the kitchen, Tom called that he was almost ready.

“He seems awfully nice — Tom,” George said.

Immediately, the wit was back in Sheila’s smile. “Yes?” she said. It seemed to George an oddly dangerous affirmative.

“Is he … a writer too?” Deep water. He couldn’t touch bottom with his feet.

“Tom? No—” Sheila laughed loudly enough for George to fear that Tom himself would hear his name being talked of.

“What does he do?”

“Things.” The word was definite, and final.

“Things …” George said, feeling stupid.

“He makes things. He trades in things. He doesn’t go in for abstractions.”

“Soufflé—” Tom said, standing in the kitchen door. He was holding it in a pair of thick floral oven gloves. The soufflé had risen from its brown earthenware dish like a thatched cottage with eaves and gables. George, on his way to the table, passed the two watercolours on the wall. “Gwen John,” he said, and nodded twice, checking his bearings.

When Sheila stood up to clear away the soufflé dishes, Tom said, “What kind of wood grows where you come from, in Africa?”

George had been watching Tom as he ate. He studied the way Tom’s loaded fork negotiated a clear passage through the straits of his beard. He studied the way Tom’s eyes lifted, every minute or so, to Sheila’s face. He studied Tom’s enormous left hand as it rested on the tabletop. The fingers were spread like roots, but their nails had been pared back to expose four slender crescents of innocent and unprotected-looking skin.

Tom was a very rare bird indeed. Never before had George met anyone whom Sheila loved. Watching Tom, he searched for Sheila — and lost her again in every movement that Tom made. The more he watched, the stranger his daughter grew to him. He couldn’t figure it out at all.

“Iroko?” Tom said. “Mahogany?”

“No, we don’t have enough rainfall. There’s a lot of mahogany in Senegal, but I don’t think there’s any in Montedor. I don’t know about iroko, but I rather doubt it.”

“There’s the baobab, of course,” Tom said.

“Yes. And a lot of acacia. Then there’s the wa-wa tree.”

“Wa-wa?”

“Wa-wa,” George said in his Wolof voice. “Wa-wa. West Africa Wins. It’s a very light, soft, white wood. Like balsa, but more stringy and fibrous. People make dug out canoes from it, things like that.”

“I’d like to see that,” Tom said. “Wa-wa.”

Something crashed in the kitchen.

“You do … wood carving?” George said, looking at Tom’s hands.

“No. Just shelves and doors and stuff. I did try to carve an angel once. It didn’t work out. I had the wrong wood. Mahogany. You needed lime for that; mahogany was far too hard. It made my hands bleed. I never got beyond the face.”

Sheila came in carrying a casserole. She served out portions of some sort of stew.

George said, “You said you were working, Sheila. What’s on the stocks? New book?” He saw Tom gazing at him, then at Sheila, like a spectator following a ball in a tennis match.

“Yes,” Sheila said. “A book. It goes in stops and starts. Mostly stops, lately.”

“Can one … ask what it’s about?”

“Oh — depression, melancholia, slipped discs and the vapours.” Her colour was high, her stare challenging. She blinked furiously as if she was trying to get grit out of her eyes. Tom was looking at her now as if she’d just solved a puzzle for him.

“A … medical book?”

“No.” She cut an irritable slice out of the air with her knife. “A sort of social book. It’s about … women … and how they’ve used nervous diseases as weapons and symbols and devices …”

“Does it have a title?”

“Woman’s Complaint” Sheila said, and laughed her dangerous, witty laugh.

“It sounds fascinating,” George said, anxiety making the words creak in his mouth.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Father. Of course it doesn’t.”

“No — honestly … But I would have thought … as a leading feminist …”

“I’m not a feminist!” Sheila almost sang the words, in a shattering soprano. “Feminists these days are very serious ladies. I’m not in that class. I’m a hack.”

George, on the run now, took the remark and hastily subjected it to all the tests he could think of for irony and wittiness. The results were inconclusive.

“Oh, I mean it,” Sheila said.

He was lost. Way south of the river. Poking at the meat on his plate, he said, “This is delicious,” and looked hopefully around him, a contrived smile fixed to his face.

Tom said, “It’s a carbonade. It’s easy. You cook it in Guinness.”

They were back in the withdrawing part of the room. Sheila poured coffee. George swigged off the last of the sour Dão in his glass. He’d accounted for one of the two bottles; Sheila and Tom had divided the other equally between them. He mourned the Leoville-Barton in Vera’s bag like a lost friend. He wondered if Sheila kept brandy in the house and decided that she didn’t.

Sheila said, “Why are you going to Geneva, Father?”

“Oh … there’s a bit of unfinished business that I have to sort out … I have to see some gnomes.”

“Tom’ll drive you to Heathrow.”

“Oh — no need for that. I can perfectly well get a taxi.”

“No problem,” Tom said. “I’ve got to see a bloke in Hounslow anyway.”

Why was it that in England George was always on someone’s way to somewhere else? It made his journeys seem unoriginal; it made the country itself seem no bigger than a village street.

“And when you come back from Switzerland,” Sheila said, “what will you do then?”

A little loosened by the wine, George said, “Well — I’m buying a boat.”

“A boat?” Sheila seemed to be holding the word up close to her eyes for inspection, as if it was in Portuguese.

“A sort of trawler-thing with sails and just enough space to live on at a pinch.”

“And where will you sail, in your boat?”

“Oh, here and there. I thought I’d like to drift round England for a while. There are so many places that I haven’t seen at all, or haven’t seen for forty years … Living in Cornwall’s made me feel footloose.”

“Do you really need a boat to do that?”

“There’s something very first-hand about going anywhere by sea. If you’ve navigated your own way there, you feel you’ve literally discovered the place. It seems to be a nice idea to be the Columbus of … oh, Hastings and Lyme Regis.”

“All by yourself? Is that safe, Father?”

He felt indulged and scolded. In Sheila’s voice he heard his plans sound solemnly childish. He might just as well have confessed that it was his ambition to build a model railway up in the attic.

“Yes, I think so. Pretty safe. It’ll probably give me about as much in the way of adventure as I can decently stand at my time of life.”

“I suppose it’s never too late to run away to sea.” Sheila was looking like the photograph on her book again; there was an edge to her smile that held the uncomfortable suggestion that she was writing him.

He said: “I think I see it more as a way of coming home.”

“I shall be worried for you,” Sheila said.

“I was in the Navy, Sheila. One way and another, most of my time’s been spent with ships.”

“The Navy?” Tom said. He’d been sitting as bulky and still as a sofa.

“Yes. Briefly. At the end of the war and just after. ’44 to ’46.”

When Tom left the room without a further word, the whole house seemed to tilt slightly.

Sheila said: “I remember you sent me Swallows and Amazons once, for Christmas …”

George remembered too. He’d still been in Aden. That was the Christmas when the decree nisi came through on what would, in England, have been Boxing Day.

“I suppose it wasn’t really your sort of thing at all—”

“I did try. But I couldn’t get on with those ineffably jolly children. There was a girl in it called Titty, and just reading her name used to send shivers down my spine. I’m afraid the net result was to make me feel rather superior about staying on dry land in Norwich.”

This, George thought, is the conversation I was trying to have with Sheila in 1955—we’re nearly thirty years too late. So he said, “It was the only thing I could find in Mesloumian’s Bookshop. You could never get anything you really wanted there.”

Tom came back. He was holding a small wooden chest which he put on the floor beside George’s chair. He smiled at Sheila, smiled at George, as if he was going to produce strings of white doves and knotted handkerchiefs. “Sextant,” he said, and opened the chest.

It looked like a museum piece. A seaman would have disapproved of the way the sextant shone, its overpolished brass and inlaid silver snatching at the light in the room. The nap of the green baize in which it nested had been brushed up against the grain, giving it the texture of a freshly mown and watered lawn.

“You know how to work it, then?” Tom said.

“I used to. A long time ago.”

George lifted it from its case, taking pleasure in the way the instrument had so much more weight to it than its airy, fretwork structure seemed to allow. He folded the smoked horizon glasses back from the mirror, screwed the telescope into its socket, and focused the lens on the edge of the dining table. The sextant smelled of old age and machine oil. Lodging it against his eye, his right arm braced against his chest, he began to remember in a happy rush — the classroom in the requisitioned holiday camp at Pwllheli, noon sights on the Hecla, the bleached blue spines of the Admiralty Tables in their shelf on the bridge.

He stroked the knurled screw on the end of the index arm between his thumb and forefinger, and gently mated the reflected image of the table with the table he could see through the telescope. Then he peered at the engraved scale, squinting up close to the swivelling magnifier on the index arm. The scrolled arrow was pointing exactly to zero.

“Seems in very fair shape,” George said.

“How do you find out where you are?” Tom said.

George showed him. Watching the table edge through the telescope, he hunted with the mirror for the reflection of the light bulb overhead, then lowered the image of the bulb until it just grazed the tabletop.

“12 degrees. 35 minutes.” He snapped the figures out as if a bridge rating was standing at his elbow to record them.

Tom, sitting nearer to the table, tried it, and got fifteen degrees.

“The light bulb’s the sun; the table’s your horizon,” George said; but he was thinking of the enormous sky over the Indian Ocean, its lacework of flaring stars … standing watch, steaming slowly through Capricorn. He’d been a bloody good navigator. He loved the old-fashioned fussiness of the subject and the instruments that went with it. He treasured his own sextant, and was made miserable by its theft, years later, on a cargo boat somewhere between Mombasa and Cape Town. It was like losing a way of looking at the world, and George had felt himself narrow a little with its going.

Tom had turned in his chair and was busy bringing the ceiling down to touch the skirting board. Without looking away from the eyepiece, he said: “It must feel quite good to do this to the sun and the stars. The closer you get to the Equator, the bigger the angle between you and the sun, right?”

“Yes — so long as the sun is over the Equator at the time.”

“Like at the equinox,” said Tom from behind his sextant, his great hand bunched awkwardly round the little vernier screw.

“Forget Copernicus,” George said. “That’s the first lesson in celestial navigation. Forget Copernicus. The earth doesn’t go round the sun; the sun goes round the earth, and the stars go round us too …”

At Pwllheli, the nav instructor had been an elderly two-and-a-halfer who’d been recalled for the duration from his retirement to a nearby prep school. Commander Prynne. A sweet man. He had treated his pupils as if they were all aged ten. He told stories and twinkled and handed out tiny schoolboy prizes to the cadet officers of George’s intake. “Navigation,” he began, “may not be the queen of the sciences, but it is, of all the sciences, certainly the kindliest to man. For only navigation puts the earth slap bang in the middle of the universe.” Prynne’s snuffling tenor was superbly imitable. Everyone had a shot at it: Prynne on the care of the sextant, Prynne on what he called “naughty old Polaris”, Prynne’s helpless pronunciation of the word “azimuth”, which always came out as “wodjimoo”.

So, now, George treated Tom and his daughter to Prynne and Pwllheli. For the first time in the evening, he was enjoying himself. Emboldened by his imitation of Prynne, he went on to do Lieutenant Carver, an RNVR man who had a family undertaker’s business in Leeds. Carver’s dreadful gravity on the subject of the Siderial Hour Angle had been another party piece in the cadets’ mess, and George made an excellent job of Carver’s strained and lugubrious vowels. He talked happily of laying position lines and finding intercepts. He told of how it was to crouch wedged against the gun emplacement on the afterdeck, drenched in spray, trying to shoot the sun in a cloudy sky on a heavy beam sea.

“There’s not much that beats it, you know,” George said. “When you’re out in the open ocean with an empty chart, and you can put your finger on a pencilled cross and know that you’re exactly there. Well, give or take a mile or two.”

Sheila was nodding, her badger head dipping forward as regularly as a pump. Tom, his eyes hidden from George, was nursing the sextant in his lap, turning it slowly over and over.

George was appalled. “So sorry,” he said. “There’s no bore worse than a war bore.”

“Heavens, no — it’s not boring at all,” Sheila said.

But it was. He could see. Worse, he could hear his own voice. It was the voice of a bore — the very voice that George himself had learned to dodge whenever he heard it approaching in a club, or bar, or hotel foyer. It was the sort of voice that went with deaf aids, liver spots and gravy stains on ties. It was ripe with the menacing vanity of old age. Until this moment, George had despised bores — had found them guilty of a basic moral deformity. Now he wondered if boringness was not perhaps a disease that picked its victims as indifferently as renal failure. One day you simply woke up and found that you’d caught it. You couldn’t take pills for it. You couldn’t have an operation. You lugged your symptoms round with you and bored in exactly the same way as other men limped or coughed or got the shakes. The only difference was that they were pitied for their afflictions, but you were hated for yours.

There was no laughing off this first attack. He was anxious to find out just how bad it had been. Was there a chance that it had been merely a warning, like a passing giddy spell? Or was it more like a case of severe internal bleeding, a sign that something irreversible had happened?

“How perfectly ghastly of me,” he said. “I blame it all on that sextant of Tom’s. I picked it up and — was away.”

Sheila laughed; a long, swooping, skating laugh which steered cautiously clear of George’s invitation.

“I’ll put some more coffee on,” she said. As she passed Tom on her way out she paused and let her hand dawdle for a moment in the tangled black bush of his hair. The gesture looked quite unconscious and much more intimate, somehow, than any kiss could be.

George, watching his daughter, hastily dropped his gaze to the rug on the floor. He felt forlorn at what he’d seen — suddenly widowed by a touch. Then he found himself listening to his own voice in his head. It was pretending to be Commander Prynne; and when George, in panic, tried to switch it off, it only increased in volume. It was rabbitting on about how to calculate the Wodjimoo of Betelgeuse. He was trapped. The voice, seizing on him as its only audience, was confident, amused, and deadly boring. All the stories that it knew were about people who were dead and times that had long ago ceased to matter.

Tom was driving. George was in the passenger seat of the minivan, his narrow knees jammed high against the dashboard, his arms folded on his chest. He was wearing his dark grey topcoat with a rim of black velvet round the collar. Seeing him come down the steps, with that coat flapping in the wind, Tom had been reminded of the moulting Andean Condor in the zoo at Regent’s Park; but when he got in the van he just looked like an elderly teddy boy with his velvet collar and his scraggy grey sideburns.

He seemed to have put on ten years overnight. When he’d first come in through the door with Sheila, he’d looked quite young, considering. When you saw him in the morning, though, you noticed the dark skin under his eyes like burnt paper and the way his tan didn’t look healthy at all, but jaundiced and short of blood. His hair needed cutting. If you had that kind of hair — trained to go back in ripples over the ears and pasted flat across the skull — you probably needed to go to the barber every couple of weeks. Sheila’s dad didn’t look as if he’d been in months. His hair had a glued-together look from the bottle of oily stuff that Tom had observed up in the bathroom. Poor old George. It was weird, him looking so like Sheila. Same eyes, and just the same funny trick of the mouth so that you were never quite sure when he was smiling and when he was being sarcastic.

“Snow,” Tom said. They were driving along the edge of Clapham Common. There wasn’t much snow. It was melting on the roofs of houses and lay in patches on the grass of the Common like dirty rags. It never settled for long in London. That was because every big city created its own climate: it had its own winds, its own temperature range, its own humidity — everything. Compared with Essex, London was in the tropics. Banana country.

“Where are we?” George said.

“Wandsworth. It’s always a bit tight here, this time in the morning.”

On the far side of the road, he saw Winston in his black Thunderbird, waiting to filter right to Wandsworth Bridge. Tom hooted — a long, a short and a long. Winston turned in his seat, waved, and came back with an electric orchestra playing the first line of “Colonel Bogie”.

“Friend of mine,” Tom said.

“Do you know the Morse code?” George said.

“No. Why?”

“You just did ‘K’ on your horn. It means ‘I want to communicate with you’.”

“Well, I did, didn’t I?”

They climbed West Hill.

Tom had never seen Sheila so tensed-up as she had been last night. When she came to bed, she was rigid and shivery; all gooseflesh, like someone who’s been pulled out of the water after nearly drowning. He’d held her, willing her to sleep, but it was he who slept first. The last thing he remembered was Sheila’s half-audible muttering about how she’d bitched it, and how it was like playing the same crackly record for the hundredth time.

It hadn’t been that bad. A bit dire, maybe; but not very. For an old guy, Sheila’s dad was OK. The trouble was that there didn’t seem to be any proper level to him. First he’d been as uptight as a scared cat, then, after he’d had a bit, he’d gone all round the park. It wasn’t surprising that he was such a funny colour in the morning: he’d been pickling himself. Tom and Sheila had only had a glass each, and they’d started with two bottles. And that wasn’t the end of it, either. Sheila’s dad drank on the sly. Tom had looked in his bag; there was another bottle there. Emergency supplies.

“This part of London’s all new to me,” George said.

“Putney,” Tom said. He pointed left, up Putney Hill. “Algernon Charles Swinburne lived up there. With another guy.” He thought for a moment until the blue plaque came into focus in his head. “Theodore Watts-Dunton,” he said.

George stared. The lights changed. On the Upper Richmond Road, it was bumper to bumper, with the westbound trucks packed solid like blocks of stone.

“Will you go back to Africa again?”

George unfolded his long arms and clasped his knees. If you just glimpsed him in silhouette, it was pure Sheila.

“Well … yes,” George said, “I rather think I may.”

The traffic shuffled forwards for fifty yards and locked again.

“When?”

“Oh … quite soon, I suppose. In the autumn, perhaps.” He was gazing out at the houses as if he wasn’t used to seeing houses at all. Perhaps he was looking for mud huts. In Roehampton. “You see, I’m not exactly retired, yet.”

Poor old bugger. That was just what Tom’s grandad used to say. He was still saying it a week before they cremated him in Gunnersbury. And he was eighty-four.

“There’s another job out there that I could do. They asked me before I left. Adviser on Foreign Trade. It’s not much of a job, really; a lot less grand than it sounds. I’d just be a glorified gopher.”

“Gopher?”

“You know. Go-for this … go-for that …” He did a snickety little laugh, like a cough, and stared out of the window all the way to Hammersmith Bridge, where he looked at the moored boats on the river and said, “Sorry about last night — all that nautical stuff.”

“No, it was interesting,” Tom said. “Really. That’s something I’d like to do — sail round England. You could get a lot of thinking done, I reckon … at sea.” He was wondering what he’d say if Sheila’s dad asked him to go with him. He wouldn’t mind giving it a try, for a few days anyway. He’d like to learn Navigation. But all George said was “Yes,” and smiled one of his twisty, Sheila-like smiles; then, “Awfully good of you, to drive me all this way,”

On the M4, Tom tucked the van into the slipstream of an airport coach and tried to bring the subject up again.

“What’s its construction — this boat of yours?”

“Oak frame. Larch planks. Teak deck, teak sole. The saloon’s fitted out in mahogany.”

“Nice.” On the open fields of Middlesex, the snow lay more thickly, in broad scoops and dripping ridges. Tom said, “How many people can you have on her?”

“Oh, it’s meant to sleep six. That means there’s just about enough room for one person to swing the proverbial cat in.”

So that was that, then.

Inside the airport tunnel, George said: “I’m so glad to have met you, Tom … I’ve never seen Sheila looking better.”

Tom very nearly said something then, but remembered just in time.

At the terminal, George’s legs were all tangled up with his carrier bag and he had difficulty getting out. Tom reached into the back of the van, where he’d hidden the sextant under an oily blanket.

“You’ll be needing this,” Tom said.

The odd thing was, he didn’t seem too pleased to see it. He stared at it lying on the seat and started muttering about how no, he couldn’t possibly and that it was an awfully kind thought, but really … He looked old and sort of faffy, standing there making little, awkward pushing-away gestures with his hands, his carrier bag dangling from his wrist.

“Go on, take it,” Tom said. “It’ll be useful for you. On your voyage.”

He crumbled, eventually, though there was still something funny in his eyes as he went into his thanks-awfully bit. Tom did his best to deflect the downpour. After all, it had been Sheila’s idea, not his. He’d been meaning to sell the sextant to Con in Chelsea.

Tom watched as George was absorbed into the terminal. For a few seconds, he could still see George’s topcoat swirling round his knees, his ducklike walk, the carrier bag and the sextant. Then they were lost behind a crowd of kids with skis. It was a pity, really, that Sheila had never got around to telling him about the baby; it might have cheered the poor old bugger up.