Foreign Land

CHAPTER NINE

Diana Pym was a black silhouette against the sun. In outline she was comically topheavy: an obese and shaggy sheepskin coat supported by a starved pair of ankles and calves.

George was down on his knees on the deck scraping at the caulked planking with a block of holystone.

“That looks like a nice thing to be doing,” she said, talking out of her private patch of darkness. There was something actressy in her voice, fogged and roughened with chainsmoking as it was. Once upon a time it had been sent to school to learn things like projection and breath control.

“Do come down, if you can manage the ladder,” George said.

“May I really? I’d like that-”

There were only five rungs of the ladder to negotiate, but Diana Pym faced them like a mountaineer on a precipice. George reached out to help her step over the rail; when she gripped his hand he felt the tense bony nervousness of her, like a fizzle of static.

“Oh. Thank you. I’m not so hot at heights.” She stared back at the dripping weed on the quay wall. When she moved out of the wall’s shadow into the sun, she looked tired. Daylight wasn’t kind to her. At first glance her face was that of a girl, then the sun picked out the skin around her eyes, like the crazed varnish of an old picture.

“In five years of living here, I’ve never actually been on a boat before.” Her gaze was loose and unfocused as she looked about her, smiling vaguely at everything she saw. To the two anchors lashed down on the foredeck, she gave a little knowing nod. “What do you call this? I mean, is it a yacht, or a schooner, or what?”

“She’s a ketch,” George said. He pulled aside a tangle of dirty rope to clear a gangway for her.

“Oh, I’m sorry. She, of course.” She laughed. “And that brick there … is that what they call a holystone?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I thought it must be. You looked just like a Muslim on a prayer mat.”

“Facing east, too,” George said. “Though more towards Moscow than Mecca.”

“Is that the way you incline?”

“To Moscow? Good Heavens, no.”

Diana Pym looked disappointed. She walked gingerly on the deck, clinging to the rail, as if the boat might at any moment choose to tip her out into the harbour. At the entrance to the wheelhouse she said abruptly: “You’re growing a beard—”

George touched the bristles on his chin: he’d forgotten about them. “No, not exactly. I suppose I’m just waiting to see if one turns up.”

She stared at his face for a moment with a frankness that he found unsettling. “It’ll suit you.”

“The last time I tried to grow a beard, it wasn’t a success. I was nineteen and in the Navy. You had to get permission from the captain to stop shaving, then after thirty days you had to take your beard to him for an inspection. I was inordinately proud of mine. I thought it added no end of authority to my face. Made me look born to command. That … wasn’t what the captain thought, though. At the end of thirty days, he took one look at it and ordered the thing off.”

“How long has this one been going?”

“Oh … four days, I think. No, five.”

“You’ll pass.”

“You think?”

“It’s such a lovely colour. Pure silver.”

George laughed; an embarrassed honk that scared the gulls on the quay wall. He showed Diana Pym through the wheel-house, down the steps and into the shadowy saloon. He lit the gas under the kettle and covertly fingered his raw bristles.

He’d hung a trailing fern in a raffia basket from a beam on the coachroof, and Diana Pym stood on the far side of the greenery. The saloon was full of the damp fleecy smell of her coat, and this stranger’s smell made the saloon itself seem suddenly strange. She was peering at his books and pictures, at the ticking barograph, at the overpolished lamps, and with each quick movement of her head, George saw that he’d created something reprehensible — something too neat to be real. It was fussy and self-regarding. He felt that he’d been caught out playing with a dolls’ house.

“I see,” she said. “It’s an ark.”

He stared at her. Was there mockery there?

“What’s it made from?”

“Oh … oak … larch … mahogany … teak …”

“No gopher wood?”

“Not a splinter.”

“Noah would have envied you.”

He made coffee in the tall pewter pot that he’d collected in Aden.

“Who is this?”

George pretended not to know what she was talking about, and carefully inspected the picture on the bulkhead. “Ah … a friend. In Montedor, … in fact.”

“And you miss her.”

He looked at her for a moment. In the half dark, she was a girl with a wistful voice on an old black and white television screen. “Yes. I do, rather.”

“She looks special.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just the way she’s looking into the camera. It’s obvious that you were taking the picture …”

“Is it?” He’d never realized that Vera wore such a giveaway expression in that photograph. It was two years old. They’d been on the beach at Sào Filipe. Teddy, who’d been snorkelling, was wearing a pair of red rubber flippers. He had picked up George’s camera and snapped Vera sitting on a rock.

“What’s her name?”

“Oh … ah, Vera …” said George distantly, pouring coffee into mugs in the galley.

A long muscle of wash from a coaster going out on the tide made the boat roll. There was a gasping sound from the fenders as they were squashed against the quay. Diana Pym clung to the saloon table, her knuckles showing white.

“It’s disorienting, isn’t it — being on a boat? It feels as if you might suddenly find the sky right under your feet.”

“Yes.” George put the mugs cautiously down on the tabletop. The green fern was swaying, the coffee slopped from rim to rim, and the four weak sunbeams from the portholes went raking up and down the mahogany walls. “I think that’s what I like best about it: I like the way it makes one moment seem quite different from the next—”

“And one day, you’ll just sail off?”

“In a while. When the weather’s right. When I’ve learned to get the hang of her.”

“Gosh.” She lit a cigarette. “Where will you go?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind. It doesn’t do to make too many plans when you take to a boat; they never work out, anyway. The best thing is just to wait and see where the weather and the tides allow you to go. Then you decide that that’s exactly where you had every intention of going in the first place.”

“Will it be far? I mean, could you go to Africa in this, or sail the Atlantic?”

“Oh, one could. I shan’t. England’s quite foreign enough for me, at present.”

Behind the coils of pale smoke and the moving fronds of fern, Diana Pym’s face dissolved, reappeared, dissolved again. “Does it ever stay still?”

“No, there’s always a sort of spongy feeling to it — you always know you’re afloat.”

“Isn’t it weird—”

“You get used to it.”

He was looking at Vera’s picture. Her expression didn’t really look all that special to him.

“I like it. It feels cosy and dangerous in equal parts.”

The sand in the foreground of the photo was as fine and white as baking powder. A line of big, crumbly tracks led from Vera’s rock to the camera. In the low sun, they showed as wedge-shaped pools of shadow. Flipper prints. He’d never noticed them there before. My Man Friday, George thought; to Diana Pym he said, “It’s best at night, with the oil lamps on and the stove going—”

“If my cottage had just been tied up to Cornwall with a rope, I guess I’d have undone the knot long ago.”

“Well, that’s the trouble with houses. They don’t float.”

“I always thought that was their point,” she said and started coughing, with the sound of crackling timber coming from deep in her lungs. Excuse me—” Her voice was hoarse and her face was reddened. “It’s this damned rainy winter.”

“It’s the cigarettes you smoke.”

“Yes,” she said with studied fairness, “they do help,” and laughed, and began to cough all over again.

“Can’t you give them up?”

“I don’t want to give them up. I’m a serious smoker. It’s much like being a good Catholic: you’re supposed to suffer for it.”

He peered at her gravely through the fern. Diana Pym was being witty; he remembered the copy of The Noblest Station in her muddy car.

“I’m sorry—” she said. She was laughing at him. Her coughing fit had left tears welling in her eyes. She fished in the pocket of her sheepskin coat and produced a rather dirty polkadot snuff handkerchief with which she mopped at her face, blowing loudly. A roving beam of light caught the powder on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.

“Have you always been this lightly attached to things?”

George’s bristles itched. He rubbed at them with his forefinger and thumb. Diana Pym’s remark was laughably off-target: she was talking to a man who’d got through a whole tube of glue in a week. “You think this is lightly?” he said.

“Isn’t it?”

“Not by my standards.”

“Oh, it is by ours,” she said, gusting smoke. “You can’t have noticed us. We all came here to dig ourselves in and take root. You’re the village heretic. You’re rocking our boat.”

When she went, the tide had lifted Calliope to a level with the quay. George pulled the boat in tight against the wall, and Diana Pym stepped ashore with a gasp and a jump. She turned back to him. “The land feels funny now,” she said. “It — kind of wobbles.”

“Well, there you are.”

She frowned, remembering something. “I know what it was. They who travel much abroad seldom thereby become holy.”

“That’s my epitaph?”

“No — just a thought.”

“Hey,” George called, “who said that?”; but she was too far away to hear.

When Diana Pym said “Do come and see the garden—” George’s first thought was Oh, Christ, must I? He hated gardens; at least he hated the gardens in this country. In Montedor it was different: the Portuguese had taught people to go in for promiscuous tangles of colour, for the idea of the garden as a happy carnival. But the gardens of St Cadix were miserable, browbeaten places, with their rows of cloches, barbered lawns and beds of frowsty little hardy annuals. They were ranged with old seed packets stuck in cleft sticks and strings of silver milk-bottle tops. The bigger they were, the worse they got: when you visited people like the Walpoles and the Collinses, you had to pick your way through the gloomy hulks of their rhododendron bushes, then you faced a defile of tea roses, pruned savagely back like so many sprigs of barbed wire.

Walking on the road round the headland to Diana Pym’s cottage, he put her down for rhododendrons, wisteria, hollyhocks and rustic furniture. He wished she hadn’t asked him. He was in for a rotten afternoon of ah, yes! and how charming! when he could have been bleeding the diesel. Since hardly anything would be out at this time of year anyway, he didn’t, quite frankly, see the point. A civilized person, George thought, would have invited him to dinner and left it at that. But Diana Pym was not a civilized person. Several of her screws seemed to George to be distinctly loose.

By the time he passed the candy-striped beacon on the Head, he was possessed by the idea that he was going to end up being forced to drink glasses of Diana Pym’s elderberry wine. Or worse. Then he remembered that Diana Pym had once been Julie Midnight, and sheepishly retracted each thought one by one.

There was a plain farm gate set in a dry-stone wall, and a metal postbox marked PYM nailed to a hawthorn tree. Beyond the gate, a track led through a dripping spinney and out on to a hillside of gorse, turf and cracked and rumpled rock. High overhead, a ribbed pillar of granite was topped with a single black pine; below it there was a shallow green ravine, and at the bottom of the ravine a cottage stood on a promontory in its own horseshoe bay. He couldn’t see the garden anywhere.

The water was calm and clear, and from this height the bay showed itself as a baited trap of reefs and shoals. Serrated teeth of rock lay just a foot or so below the surface. A stranger coming in from the sea would strike in seconds. Standing on a slippery outcrop, George looked down and tried to work his way through the maze of purple submarine shadows. There was one hook-shaped channel of deep water between the little promontory and the open sea: the fisherman whose cottage this must have been would have needed four separate sets of marks to get in and out. George found two of them — cairns of loose stones piled above the tideline.

“Hello!” Diana Pym was carrying a sickle.

“It’s … perfectly charming,” George said, beginning as he meant to carry on.

“You see — you could have sailed your boat here.” There were burrs on her jeans and the backs of her wrists and hands were dotted and dashed with small thorny welts.

“Yes — and got wrecked first time out,” he said.

“Oh, no; the sea’s nearly always flat calm here in the cove. It’s safe as houses.”

He pointed out the lines of the reefs. “Oh, really?” Diana Pym said, “I always thought that was just seaweed.”

It took several minutes of scrambling over rocks and following Diana Pym down muddy tunnels through the undergrowth in the ravine before George realized that he had been in the garden all along: the thistles and gorse, the boulders, the shale-falls, the egglike clusters of dried rabbit droppings were all part of what she meant when she said “garden”. She probably included the sea too, and the clotted cream sky.

“Look,” she said, “there’s a good dryad’s saddle.”

It was a fungus on the bole of a tree, a set of wizened tortoiseshell plates growing one on top of the other.

“The spoor of that came from a wood in Surrey, of all places. Fungi are brutes to propagate. I love them.”

She touched the mottled reddish stain on a bare shoulder of granite. “Xanthoria,” she said. “Isn’t it a pretty lichen? That’s from Wales — the Black Mountains.” George fingered the stain too. It felt rather unpleasantly soft and furry, like the skin of the dead mouse.

She had found a wild place and made it wilder. The ravine was a sanctuary for the outlaws of other people’s gardens, for ivy, wolfsbane, herb robert, black bryony. She liked plants that were poisonous, or crept along the ground, or wrapped themselves round dead trees. She went ahead of George and hacked at a patch of brown scrub with her sickle. The garden smelled of wet brambles and cigarette smoke.

“This is pretty much the centre of things—”

It was a grotto, with a waterfall pouring as smoothly as syrup from a ledge of overhanging rock, an inky pool, a willow tree, early primroses and beds of moss like plumped cushions.

“There’s nothing much here now, but the frogs come in the spring, and the frogs bring the grass snakes … and the badgers sometimes come at night …”

“You’ve got badgers?”

“The sett is off my land. But they use a track that comes through here.”

Behind the waterfall there was a chipped alabaster head, half hidden by a spray of hart’s tongue ferns. It stood on a granite shelf. It had no nose. “Who’s that?”

“Oh … the man in Bath who sold it me claimed it was Artemis. But one goddess looks much like another.”

At the tail of the pool, the water divided round a boulder of rosy quartz and trickled noisily off into a green thicket.

“I call it the stream, but it’s only a ditch, really. It went bone dry last summer. I found a heron fishing here once, but he wasn’t having any luck. It used to run down that slope there … beyond the osiers.”

“You made the waterfall?”

“Oh, yes, it’s all just engineering, really. There’s a concrete dam under all that ivy … and then I brought the stream out here through an old sewer pipe. I had to dynamite the pool.”

“Really?” George looked up at the pine on its stalk of rock, fifty yards up the ravine. “Wasn’t that dangerous?”

“I held my breath when it went off. It rained loose stones for a bit.”

“Is it legal to blow up things with dynamite?”

“I never asked.”

“Extraordinary. Where did you get the stuff from anyway?”

“Oh … I found an accomplice … I know a man who simply loves big bangs. He set it up, and I pushed the button. He used to be a drummer.”

“Have you done this everywhere you’ve been?”

“Good God, no. I never got beyond window boxes, and they all went dead on me. When I started this, I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know how it would turn out — I thought … oh, I’ll have chrysanths, and snapdragons, and hollyhocks and things. Like everybody does.” She hacked off a trailing branch of alder. “Then I discovered I had a talent for weeds.”

They climbed down the narrow zig-zag path to the shore. From behind him, Diana Pym said, “I saw your … Sheila on TV yesterday.”

“Oh?” He’d spoken to Sheila over the phone on Tuesday: she hadn’t said anything about being on television. “Ah — yes, of course.”

“She was good.”

“Wasn’t she—” He sidestepped a jagged chunk of rock. Sheila might have mentioned it. He’d been looking out for one of her programmes for weeks now.

“She made everyone else look wooden, I thought. She gives the impression of being completely herself in the studio — that’s so difficult to do, much harder than it looks.”

“Yes …” George said, trying to guess his way out. “She seems almost more natural in front of the cameras than she does at home. Funny, really. Every time she goes on, she has frightful fits of nerves beforehand, you know … shakes like a leaf …” He was glad that Diana Pym couldn’t see his face; but he seemed to have carried it off all right because the next thing she said was, “Your wife — she … died?”

“No — she’s in Norfolk.” He scrambled down the last few feet of shale.

The cottage was too lumpish to be pretty: there was something toadlike in the way it squatted on its promontory, a low building of stone and slate with deepset windows that looked too small for it. The tide had gone right out, leaving it stranded in a waste of ribbed rock and drying bladderwrack. Hooded crows were scavenging in the seaweed; beyond them, George saw another of the fisherman’s marks — a splash of old white paint on a boulder.

“It looks so bald when the sea’s out, I’m afraid,” Diana Pym said.

“No, it’s — charming. Quite charming.” There were two battered blue gas cylinders outside the door. A shrivelled strip of pork rind hung from a bird table, and the stony turf was scattered with crumbs. It was a rum place for anyone to beach at: Diana Pym must have made it by just as complicated a route as the fisherman who used to sail his boat in here. George wondered where her marks had been. “What were you doing in Los Angeles? Singing?” he said, once they were inside.

The cottage smelled of damp and woodsmoke. She was clearing the friendly litter of books, ashtrays and last Sunday’s papers from the tiny living room.

“No, not then. That was after I stopped singing. Do you hate mess? Your boat’s so neat. I haven’t any whisky; only gin or wine. Or is it too early for you?”

“No — gin will do fine.”

She moved through the cottage scattering announcements over her shoulder as she went. “Let’s have a fire!” she said; then “Aren’t these dark afternoons just hell!”; then “I’m out of ice!”; then “I only got the electricity put in last year!”; then “No; don’t you move!” Still in her gumboots, she shuttled between kitchen and living room, all bone and nerve like a trapped bird against a windowpane.

A copy of the Radio Times was on top of the television; it was open at yesterday’s programmes, and George scanned their titles to find out which one Sheila had been on. None of them seemed to be about books: she must have been on another channel.

Diana Pym raked out the ash in the open fireplace. “I was saying about LA … When I went there first, I tried to get into acting. Not proper acting — just TV and radio ads. I was renting out my British accent. Then I bought a slice of a press agency, and spent two years having lunch. Then I went into personal management — singers, you won’t have heard of them. Then I did some work for Joan Baez. Then I sold up and got the house in Brittanny.”

She said this flatly, not looking at him. It didn’t sound like a life at all. He couldn’t imagine her doing any of those unreal jobs in that unreal city. A firelighter flared blue in the grate. Diana Pym said, “Have you been in Southern California?”

“No; I’ve been to New York, but never to the West Coast.”

“It’s a lot like Cornwall. More sunshine … more golf buggies; it’s got the same sea and the same little hills. But they’ve got Spanish names.”

Beside the fireplace there was a dusty glass-fronted bookcase, its doors wedged shut with folded cigarette packets. The books inside looked dull. There were a lot of newish ones on horticulture; the older ones all seemed to be about religion. He saw The Cloud of Unknowing, something by Teilhard de Chardin, The Courage to Be, The Way to Perfection.

He said: “But you’re here to stay?”

The logs were beginning to burn. Diana Pym, crouched in the firelight, had accomplished another of her unsettling reversions: her face had lost twenty years. She said, “I guess so, yes. But I wouldn’t swear to it.”

“You should meet Sheila,” he said, “I was going to ask her down.”

“How old is she?” Diana was half-way to the kitchen.

“Oh …” He had to think back to answer that one. He went through the decades on his fingers. “Thirty … seven … I think.”

“Oh, that’s not so old—”

“For what?”

“For having a baby,” she said.

He stared at her. Was she quite bats? He held his fire. “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose it is.”

“Does she want a boy or a girl?”

“I … don’t think … she has any … particular preference.”

“Oh.” She went on into the kitchen. “Of course,” she called, “with the scans they have now, people seem to know the sex of their babies almost as soon as they’re conceived.”

George wasn’t listening; he was remembering something that he’d passed over in the Radio Times. He pulled the magazine off the television set and studied it on his knee. It wasn’t a book programme at all. Feeling shaky, he gazed at the print of the billing:

2.45 BABYTALK

5. (Of 6): The Latecomers.

Having a first baby when you’re over 35 can

bring its own special problems and rewards.

The panel of speakers included “Sheila Grey, feminist and mother-to-be”. Impending motherhood, apparently, had made her drop that aggressive pair of initials and go back to the first name that had been George’s own choice for her; though he did wonder, for a hopeful moment, if there might conceivably be some other Sheila Grey altogether.

George’s next indignant thought was that this wasn’t the sort of thing that anyone wanted to learn from the pages of the Radio Times. He was offended not so much by Sheila as by the magazine itself — its grubby typography and the blotchy photograph of a grinning comedian with tombstone teeth. He replaced it on the television set. Diana was back again.

“I was … wondering where the bathroom was …” George said.

“Oh — just through there, the door at the end.”

“Thanks—”

Gratefully bolting himself in, George took sanctuary. First things first … Steady the Buffs … He peed, aiming his stream fastidiously at the painted blue shield of Thos Wilson & Co St Austell on the cracked porcelain bowl. He washed his hands. He rinsed his eyes in cold water. He squeezed a striped worm of toothpaste on to his forefinger, and rubbed at his front teeth with it.

Why in hell’s name—

He swilled the pepperminty stuff round his mouth and spat.

Who does she think I am?

He combed the swallowtails of grey hair back over the tops of his ears. He tried running the comb through the stubble round his chin, but the bristles weren’t yet long enough to tame.

You’d think … her own father …

He pulled down the saggy skin under his eyes and inspected them in the mirror. The whites were reassuringly white. He bared his teeth at himself.

In the Radio Times, of all places. The bloody Radio Times!

The mirror over the basin was also the door of a small cupboard. He opened it. Diana was evidently no great collector of medicines: it was a disappointing show … two half-empty bottles of cough mixture, some disinfectant, a tin of Elastoplast, scent phials, 2-milligram tablets of Valium, no secrets. He hesitated over the Valium for a moment, and closed the door with a spasm of guilt at having raided such an innocent bower. But the act of trespass had calmed him.

He saw that the framed picture over the lavatory wasn’t in fact a picture at all; it was a presentation record, made of doubtful silver, and awarded to Julie Midnight in December 1961 to mark the sale of 250,000 copies of a song called “Talking in the Dark”. George remembered a line about “walking in the park”, then a chorus:

But this I tell you true,

That best of all with you,

I like talking in the dark.

Talking in the dark …

Talking in the dark …

The silver disc looked antique now. The gothic script on the imitation vellum was convincingly faded.

Julie Midnight

“Talking in the Dark”

Lyrics: D. Pym

Melody & Arr: Ben Gold

With The Carol Benson Singers & The King Pins

So she did write her own words. It was funny to think that pop singers might mean what they sang. Had there been a real person to whom Diana really did like talking in the dark — and was he, perhaps, the same chap who, after all the kissing and laughter, was going to walk out on her next week, next month, or maybe the month after? Had he in fact-walked? And was it because of him that she’d gone off to America? Or was the whole thing just a pose, contrived to tap the market in brittle little ballads of half-requited love? There was something teasing about the way she’d hung the record over the lavatory: you’d have to be male in order to find yourself standing face to face with it. Had she planned that too?

He made a final check in the mirror: there was a speck of lint on his lapel and a splash of toothpaste in the bristles at the corner of his mouth. Shoulders back … chin up … smile, please. He unbolted the door, ducked under the beam and steamed cautiously ahead into the living room, his colours hoisted and his hatches battened down.

When Diana said “You will stay on to have some supper, won’t you? It’s nothing much, just chops and things …”, George realized that he’d been wondering how to avoid going back to Thalassa. It was a relief to stand in Diana’s kitchen, watching the bramble-scarred backs of her hands as she peeled the papery skin from an onion. It was nice to be told where things were and assigned the small symbolic tasks of an acolyte. She showed him where the corkscrew lived. He went out to the woodpile and filled her wicker basket with logs. He could hear the spitting fat in the pan on the kitchen stove and the sound of the tide coming in over the rocks in the dark. There was no wind, the sky was low with cloud, and the water was fitting itself stealthily, invisibly, around the house and drowning the shoreline of the bay.

The knowledge of Sheila’s baby had started as a sudden blow to the gut; it changed to an itch, and each time George remembered it he felt compelled to scratch.

“Odd, really,” he said “ … Sheila going on television like that, so … long before the event.”

“Yes, when is it due?”

He’d hoped that Diana would be able to tell him that. “Oh … not for ages yet. This Moselle’s nice — where does one go for wine round here?”

Diana asked if Sheila was his only child. Yes, said George, but he was thinking of that other baby in his life — a baby curiously more vivid to him in some ways than Sheila had ever been. For Sheila was always Angela’s child—hers in the same way that her frocks and the MG and her torn nursery teddy bear were hers. George had only once seen Sheila being breastfed: that was a part of Angela’s personal toilette, and she would no more have allowed him to be present than she would have let him see her on the lavatory.

But the other baby was different. He still sometimes surfaced in George’s dreams, with his outraged old man’s face and lobster body. George liked to imagine him as a farmer now, with terraces of vines and olive trees … a serious family man with a fat wife and a string of kids of his own.

He said: “When I was in the Navy, there was a tiny scrap of a baby … Greek …”

“You mean, yours?”

“No, not mine. I just pulled him out of the water and looked after him for a few hours—”

It was a week after VJ Day. Hecla, bound for Singapore, was still in the Mediterranean, 300 miles short of the Suez Canal. They spotted the burning refugee ship at midnight — she looked like a mirage city on the horizon. It turned out later that the fire started when a nurse overturned a primus stove; by the time Hecla arrived, the ship was alight from end to end. Half her lifeboats and rafts were gone and she was listing badly; a great floating bonfire that lit the faces of the men on Hecla’s bridge and showed the sea as an amazing ruddy tangle of heads, carley floats, empty lifebelts, fibre suitcases, cardboard boxes and bits of smoking woodwork. The submarine Trouncer was lying off, a mile from the ship, and had launched a little flotilla of rubber dinghies; they bobbed about in the lumpy sea as if they had escaped from a suburban regatta.

The captain asked all strong swimmers in the crew to volunteer. George, naked in his lifejacket, went into the water as soon as the scrambling nets were lowered over the side. It was a curious business. Every time you saw a body, it turned out to be something else. George rescued a very lifelike overcoat, a pair of oilskin trousers, somebody’s sleeping bag and a dead goat before he found his first real survivor — an elderly man in a flat cap, clutching a plucked chicken, who gazed at George with fixed reproach as he was dog-paddled to the ship’s side. He missed the baby twice, swimming straight past it in an attempt to save what turned out to be an upturned wastepaper basket and a coil of heavy rope.

Hecla was in chaos. The flight deck had been turned into a shanty town of tarpaulins rigged over lines of blankets and palliasses. No-one wanted George’s baby. The refugees were in shock. They stared as he tried to show them his wet little bundle, saying “Yes? Yes? You like? You know Mama?” He walked up and down the lines, robed in a towel, trying to find a medical orderly to take the baby off his hands. No go. George carried it to his cabin, where he cut its raggy clothes off with a pair of scissors, patted it dry and wrapped it in his pyjamas.

The baby was eerily silent. It lay on George’s bunk, as pale and waxy as if it had been carved in cream cheese. Then it slowly reddened, and as its colour came back it started to bawl; a high thin shriek that started like the sound of tearing silk, then grew in volume until the whole cabin seemed to be contained inside the baby’s cry.

George pulled faces at it. He rocked it in his arms. He warmed some milk over the wardroom stove and tried to drip it into the baby’s mouth from the end of a teaspoon. Now the shriek was like a drill grinding on a raw nerve in a back tooth.

“Hush,” he said. “Hush. Please hush—” The baby drew breath, stared in a wobbly cross-eyed way at a point somewhere just in front of its nose, and let out a chainsaw scream. George crooked his little finger, dipped it in the milk, and offered his wet knuckle to the small, purple knot of anger that was the baby’s face.

“I’m sorry,” George said. The baby howled. George saw it dying on him. How often did babies need to be fed? Could they die of apoplexy? He felt uselessly male. The baby was yelling Breast! Breast! Breast! and flat-chested George was no bloody good to it at all. Justice, felt George, was all on the baby’s side.

Breast! Breast! Breast!

On setting out for the Far East, everyone on the Hecla had been issued with three French letters, Captain’s Orders. (“On my ship,” the captain had announced over the tannoy system on the first Sunday out, “anyone who comes back with a dose of the clap goes on a charge.”) In the ratings’ quarters, they were being widely used as balloons. George’s were kept hidden in a drawer under a pile of socks.

Breast! screamed the baby on the bunk.

George unrolled a condom on his thumb and punctured its limp nipple with the point of a safety pin. Then he filled the thing with the warm milk, cradled the baby in one arm, and dangled the pallid, greasy sheath over the baby’s nose.

“Come on, baby. Come on, my love. Tit—”

The baby was fooled. It fastened its lips round the end of the French letter and sucked. Milk dribbled down its cheeks and chin. Its eyes slowly closed. George cuddled it in triumph. He took it up to the bridge, where he demonstrated his invention to Farley who was on the dawn watch. The baby’s mouth moved in a vague parabola to form what George was certain was a smile, and it farted, quite noisily, three times.

“Listen to that,” George said. “Little bugger’s in complete working order.”

“What’s its name?”

“Aristotle. Harry for short.”

“What the fuck are you proposing to do with it?”

“I don’t know. Put him down for Harrow, do you think? Angela will know what to do.” Sitting by the Asdic, George joggled the baby on his lap. Aristotle gaped at him with a devoted, owl-like stare. George held the swollen condom to the baby’s mouth; Aristotle sucked and waved his wrinkled fists.

He could still smell the baby after thirty — no, more like forty — years. To Diana, he said, “His mother had been on Trouncer all along. We located her later on in the morning. She got him back when we docked at Port Said.”

“Did you meet her?”

“No. The M.O. took charge of all that. I didn’t even learn her name. Pity, really. I have a recurrent fantasy that at least I ought to be able to send that kid a Christmas card every once in a while.”

“Were many people lost?”

“Oh …” The burning ship seemed so much further away than the baby. “There were thirty or so missing at the end of the day. We picked up about two hundred survivors; and Trouncer picked up another ninety.”

“It’s a lovely story.”

That was just what George had expected Angela to say, when he told her in the drawing room of her parents’ house in Markham Street. Instead she’d made a face and said “How perfectly disgusting!” Then, a moment later, “But you must have been frightfully brave, darling, jumping into the sea like that; do you think they’ll give you a gong?” To celebrate George’s homecoming, they had booked in for two nights at the Dorchester, where they lay between the stiff hotel sheets and George said, “Darling … do we need to go on bothering with these things?” and felt Angela shaking her head vigorously in the dark.

At the time, George was sure that Angela’s silent, sweet, impatient negative meant that she wanted a baby. He had astonished himself with his own excitement at the thought, and it was wonderful to find that Angela shared it without them having spoken a word. That was all part of being married; you just found yourself knowing and wanting the same things because you were we, and you weren’t alone any more, even in the most private rooms in your head.

When Angela came, she gripped his neck so tightly that it hurt, and she made a shocked gargling noise as if she had been injured in some awful accident. He could feel the tears on her cheeks. She said, “My God. George. George!” His name was an appalled shout on the air as he, loving his wife, came too.

Next morning they went shopping together. In the Burlington Arcade she was bright and tinny, like someone he’d just met at a cocktail party. “Oh, darling—” she kept on saying; “Oh, darling!” But there was no special intimacy in the word; it was pronounced exactly as she used to carol it over the telephone to old school chums from Hatherup Castle, like Tanya Fox and Serena Lake-Williams.

At Fortnum’s for coffee, George found a horrible idea taking hold of him like an infection. When Angela had shaken her head so violently the night before — had he got hold of the wrong end of the stick altogether? In the café, with its sobering smell of chicory and wet umbrellas, it seemed to George that Angela might have meant something quite different. Had he just reminded her of Aristotle sucking on the teat of the French letter? And was her headshake just a spasm of reminiscent disgust at the image?

Surely not. It was a giddying and shameful thought. George did his best to kill it on the cab ride to Rules, where they lunched. Seven weeks later Angela came back from the doctor’s; she was pregnant.

“Do you drink brandy?” A log cracked and whistled in the grate. Diana was putting a record on the stereo system.

“Yes, please. Is that … one of yours?”

“Oh God, no—” There was a loud bass crackle as the needle touched the rim of the disc; then, four bars in, George recognized the piece as Mozart’s clarinet quintet. He said: “I used to have this myself, on a pile of 78s, when I had a wind-up gramophone in Mombasa. My version went with a bit more of a swing than yours — it had Benny Goodman.”

“Oh, yes” she said, with her definite, actressy trick of emphasis. “Yes. That’s a neat recording.” She stood with her narrow back to him, busy with bottles on a tray. The clarinet notes were marching down the scale in pairs. Tu-whit, tu-woo. Tu-whit, tu-woo. “This is so nice.” She turned round. “Cornish evenings can seem to last for ever if one’s by oneself, don’t you think? Yes?” Her mouth was framed in a polite English teaparty smile, but her refugee eyes went on staring at him until he felt his own gaze slide away from them to the fire.

“Yes … that’s why I’m trying to teach myself to watch the television.”

“Oh? Is there a lot to learn?”

Glad of an escape route from her eyes, George told her his theory that all programmes on the television were about other programmes on the television, and that if you came to England from abroad you found yourself trying to decipher an extremely complicated code that everyone else grasped by instinct while you laboured over it as if every comedy show was being transmitted in Morse.

“It used to be our class system that foreigners could never get the hang of. Now it seems to be the television. Do you by any chance know who a man called Russell Harty is?”

When Angela returned from the doctor’s, she was fiercely gay; clattering about the house and shouting to George from distant rooms. “Did Tanya ring? We’re supposed to be going round to Lizzie’s for drinks. Did you see that man of Daddy’s?” George didn’t know why she had gone to Dr Spellman twice in a week, and was shy of asking her. When she finally landed up in the same room as George (where he was filling in an application form for a job as a trainee in a Marine Insurance company), he said, “All in order, darling?” “Yes,” she said; “Fine. Wizard. I’ve got … What do your beastly sailors call it? I’m in the pudding club,” and started to cry.

After nearly forty years the phrase still had the power to make his guts turn over. He hadn’t known what to do, what to say. He had stared at her until she yelled, “I thought you’d be pleased, if no-one else was!”, and ran up the stairs to “her” room where George, the new husband, was tolerated like an awkward guest.

Diana, smiling through her smoke, said, “Well … does it feel like a proper homecoming?”

George felt an unmanly prickling in his eyes. He couldn’t think why — perhaps it was just Diana’s cigarette, or the pine burning in the fireplace. He hoped it didn’t show. He said: “Oh … it’s just like any new posting, I suppose. It takes one a while to … shake down, you know.”

“I found it pretty medium hell when I came back.” Her eyes went on looking at him after she’d spoken as if she was still talking. They were saying, Tell, Confess.

But he couldn’t tell. He sat sprawled in her armchair: he grinned; he hid behind his tumbler of brandy; he searched for pipe and matches in his pockets; he said, “I don’t know. Do you think it’s hell not to know who Russell Harty is?”

“Limbo, at least,” Diana said. “Rather an enviable limbo, at that.”

She was looking into the fire. The long back of her cashmere sweater was stretched tight: he could count her vertebrae and see the mothwing pattern of her shoulderblades beneath the wool. She made him think of the model aeroplanes that he’d built as a boy, with their lovely, intricate frames of balsa struts and spars, their taut and glassy tissue paper skins. They were hald together by pure stress: Diana looked as if she were constructed on the same principle. George discovered that he was watching her with surprised and involuntary desire. He felt a sudden jolt of tenderness for her small bones, the surfline of down on her exposed forearm in the firelight, her sad, gruff, ruined voice. He wanted to—

“But you will stay?” Diana was still looking at the burning logs and, for two sweet seconds, George thought she was flying another signal altogether. “Yes,” he said. “There’s something going on in Montedor at present. Something rather awful, I’m afraid. It’s in the papers. It rather looks as if I shan’t be able to go back.”

It would be so nice, he thought, if he could turn to her. For comfort. For kindliness. For loneliness, too. Temporizing, he inspected his empty glass as if he’d just noticed a gang of microbes swimming in the treacly drop of liquid that remained at the bottom. Well? Did she want him to risk the hazardous crossing of the rug to where she sat by the fire? He felt as jittery about it, as nervously constricted, as he’d been at seventeen. Encouraged by something in the way her hair (and it was still blonde … a very pale, polleny blonde … it wasn’t white at all) grazed her shoulder, he shifted a couple of inches forward in his chair, but found himself finally too stiff to admit his own weakness, to make that bold, vulnerable, candid move.

“Do you want to try to explain it to me?”

George gazed at her, smiling, his head swimming a little with relief. In a tone as gentle as he could manage, he said,

“What?”

“About what’s happening … in Monty … in your African place.”

“Oh.” Disappointed, he made a show of sitting back deep in the chair. “It wouldn’t really make much sense to anyone who hadn’t been there. It’s too messy and internal. No Left or Right to it. The usual boring African story. A weak president in power, and a first-rate shit waiting in the wings to make his move. I’m a president’s man, and I wouldn’t stand a chance if the shit gets into office. That’s about it, really.” With every fresh word he spoke, he felt himself losing her.

“Will it be bloody?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. The shit has been stockpiling weapons for the last two years, and he’s got a lot of the army with him.” He watched Diana. Her face was tilted a little away from him. It seemed to drift out of focus, leaving him staring at a single enlarged eye, the colour of a harebell.

“And your friend — the one in the photograph? What’ll happen to her?”

“Oh … Vera Osorio …” George put a heavy emphasis on Vera’s second name. “She’ll be all right.” To clear himself of any lingering attachment in that direction, he added: “She’s with the Minister of Communications. He’s an old friend too, but he’ll behave like the Vicar of Bray.”

“You’re still there, aren’t you? You’re not really here at all.”

“I thought I was supposed to be in limbo.”

Stubbing out her cigarette, Diana smiled — a quick and funny twist of a smile that might conceivably have held in it the promise of something else, George thought. She said, “You’ll just have to learn now to look forward to things like taking your grandchild sailing on your boat.”

Grandchild? For a moment the word was as inexplicable as chihuahua or concertina. It didn’t seem to apply to him at all. Then George remembered. He supposed, sadly, that if Diana was sending him any signals now, she was flying her P and S flags. Keep your distance. Do not come any closer. In a studiedly offhand voice he said, “Yes. Talking of the boat, actually … I want to try her out at sea while this weather holds. Tomorrow, even … or maybe the day after.” He realized that he was quoting her old song. “If it’d amuse you to come along as a passenger—”

“I’d love to,” she said quickly; then, “So long as you realize that I’ll be no use to you at all.” She scrutinized the bramble weals on the back of her hand. “I mean, I can’t tie knots or anything like that.”

“No, no — the whole point of the boat is that I can manage her entirely on my own.”

And not only the boat, he thought, watching Diana and wishing that things were otherwise. It would have been different a year ago. It would have been different in Africa. But not now, not here. Getting up to go, he had to pause midway out of the chair to deal with a sharp twinge of Cornish lumbago. It struck him that from now on he would always have to go to bed alone. A … singlehander. The word yielded a melancholy obscenity. Upright at last, his hair tangling with a creosoted beam, he said, “Lovely evening. I did like your wild garden. I didn’t expect to at all, in honesty, but I really did.”

Diana put her hand on his sleeve for a second. “I’ll look forward to the boat. Ring me. I don’t know whether I really expect to enjoy it or not, but I’ll look forward to it.”

She drove him home. Outside Thalassa, with the car door open, he leaned across and kissed her on the cheek. Her skin tasted papery. Letting himself in to the dark house, he remembered exactly which model aeroplane it was that Diana had reminded him of. It was a Keil Kraft Osprey with a 36” wingspan, his most ambitious effort ever. It had taken six weeks of summer holiday labour with broken razorblades, coloured pins and tubes of balsa cement. Its registration letters, GA-GG, were painted on its wings and tailplane. He’d launched it on a chalky down near Oliver’s Battery. Its rubber motor had taken it straight up into a thermal, where it began to glide in a slow circle, higher and higher, its doped skin flashing in the sun. He’d timed its flight: one minute … two … three … four … four minutes forty seconds … a record. Then it lost the thermal and he had to chase it across the downs, smashing through picnickers and people with dogs out for walks. He’d run for a mile at least when the plane, losing altitude rapidly now, had banked and headed with what looked (“Oh — no! Oh, Christmas! Oh, buggeration!”) like a pure and deliberate act of will for the top of the tallest, most unscaleable elm in the whole of Hampshire. He’d been too far away to hear the crash; the white plane had dissolved silently into the branches. By the time he got to the tree, it wasn’t a plane any more; it was a mess of wastepaper, eighty feet up, with one torn wing flapping gently in the wind. At fourteen and a quarter, George had been too old to cry, but his face had felt very stiff indeed on the walk home to the Rectory. The wreckage was still visible in the tree at Christmas; by Easter there was just a small section of crushed fuselage and a triangle of skin with the letters GG on it. In the summer everything had gone. George reckoned that the rooks had probably used it to build nests with.

At high tea, his father, wearing his white alpaca summer jacket, was put into a high good humour by the news of what had happened to the Osprey. “Treasures upon earth, old boy! Moth and rust!” After tea, he’d challenged George to a game of croquet, and beat him hollow in comfortable time to go off to church and say evensong.

Now, pouring himself a modest nightcap of Chivas Regal in his father’s house, half here, half in the summer of … when was it? ’37? ’38? … George thought: you know, I haven’t changed a bloody bit. All I’ve done is fly a lot more Ospreys into a lot more trees.

He was woken by the soft splatter of the post downstairs and, stiff and liverish, was picking the letters up from the mat while the postman was still getting back into his van on the road outside. But there was nothing from Vera; just bills, a card from somebody on holiday in Crete addressed to his mother (a Cretan holiday must be seriously boring if it involved one in sending picture postcards to the dead), and a duplicated brochure for Jellaby’s Video Club. It was nearly two weeks since he’d written to Montedor. Sheila’s letters to him had rarely taken more than six days to arrive. Though that, of course, was from London, which was different. He wondered if it would be worth putting off his sea trials and waiting in for the second post. He looked up Diana’s number in the book and dialled it. Five minutes later, stooping, naked, studying his bare feet on the slate, as he rehearsed his lines, he dialled the number of his daughter. He listened to the London trill of her phone — quite different from the low chirrup-chirrup of the local telephones. It was a long time ringing. He picked up the postcard that had been sent to his mother: the handwriting on it was thin and dithery but quite legible.

Good to see you looking so well in your enchanting house in St C. V pleasant hotel here in Timbakion, though spring weather only fair. Davina and I return on 23rd. Look forward to seeing you for early lunch on 25th. D. sends love, Alice.

Some poor old bat with a badly disturbed memory. Today was the 27th, and there’d been no sign of Alice. Away in London, the phone was lifted from the hook and Sheila’s voice, still thick with sleep at 0915 hours, was saying, “Yes? Hullo?” as George swallowed the knot of anxiety in his throat and began to speak.