Foreign Land (12 page)

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

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

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

“What are you asking for her?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figuera
.

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

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

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

“George?”

The line was terrible.

“Is that …
Teddy?”

“Sure is, baby.”

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

“George …”

“Oh, sorry.”

“I’m fine. I’m in a bar.”

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

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

“Yes. I’m going there.”

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

“Will
you
be there?”

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

“Yes, I think so.”

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

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

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

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

“Tough shit.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If only things had rested there.

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

“Why?”

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

George signed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not this money.”

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

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

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

“I don’t take dash,” George said.

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

“I don’t want it.”

“So give it to the birds.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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