Foreign Land (46 page)

“How many?”

“ … three … four … five,” Tom said, handing her another sheaf of seaside smut.

She read:

She turned the card over. It said:
Brr! I’ll be glad to get something warm inside me!

“It’s revenge,” Sheila said. “He hates me.”

Tom said: “This one’s all about some bloke from Pwllheli.”

Sheila started to laugh. “Oh, God. The world’s going to be saved by a man from Pwllheli—” But she choked on her laughter and found tears in her eyes.

As the cards arrived, she tried arranging them in order, front side up, to see if there was some vindictive pattern in their
pictures or their captions, but they made no sense at all, except that they seemed to get progressively dirtier.

It took four days and seven posts to fill in all the gaps in the series. On the fourth day came the news of the gales, and Sheila’s fury with her father dissolved into helpless anxiety. She kept the radio on in her study. At each hourly news bulletin, she expected to hear something terrible. She kept on going to the lavatory next door and being sick. After the eleven o’clock news she found Tom holding her head as she spat a trickle of yellow vomit into the bowl. Grateful for his hands as they gentled her, she cried—coughing, laughing, coughing again.

“I’m sorry, lovely. I think it’s just being pregnant that does it.”

He was wiping her mouth for her.

“There’s something horribly infectious about insanity,” Sheila said. “One seems to catch it like a ’flu bug.”

“He knows what he’s doing—on the sea, I mean. He was in the Navy.”

“He’s out of his mind. He wouldn’t be safe with a pedal boat in a park. A yacht capsized off Bridlington in the North Sea. A family of four was rescued by helicopter,” she said, parroting the news.

Tom leaned against the lintel, big as a black bear. “I could go and find him for you if you like,” he said.

“Could you? How?” she said, feeling muzzy-headed and stupid. Her mouth tasted of sick. She could hear the branches of the plane tree thrashing over the house and the wind harping tunelessly in the telephone wires.

“You’d only have to ask around a bit. It’d work in nicely. I’ve got to go down to Shaftesbury sometime, anyway.”

She couldn’t imagine Tom in Shaftesbury. “Whatever for?”

“You know. Things.”

For a moment she saw her father, slung over Tom’s huge shoulder in a fireman’s lift, Tom lugging him doggedly home like the things he brought back in sacks. She was smiling now.

Tom said: “I can get down there this afternoon. If I can get
hold of Trev.”

Diana had been out before breakfast in the morning, with a raincoat pulled over her night things, to collect the mail from her box at the top of the rutted and slippery drive. Two cards by the noon delivery completed her collection. She spread them out on the rug by the fire—seventeen in all, from “My dear Diana,” to “Lots of love, George”. One of today’s cards said:

No, she didn’t mind at all. The cards had fallen out of a cold sky—an amazing bonus. She was delighted by them. Even the stupid jokes on their fronts made her laugh; and when Diana found herself laughing at
What I really want is a nice-sized tool with a rounded end!
, she knew that some happy change had taken place in her own internal weather.

It was like seeing a dam burst up on a mountainside, and feeling something in yourself go out to that avalanche of plunging water. Your response was so immediate and instinctive that you just woke to it, and accepted it, and that was that.

George. There was nothing ambiguous in the cards; the double-entendres on one side only helped to underline the plainness of the statement on the other. They were a declaration, and an invitation. They demanded a response as least half
as recklessly generous as the cards themselves.

It had been years since Diana had done anything much on impulse. The easiest answer to temptation was always to stay at home and get on with the gardening. One of the good things about St Cadix was that there was no airport within seventy miles of the place. She’d had her share of talking her way on to night flights at the last moment and finding herself the next morning, shattered and delirious, in someone else’s time zone. In St Cadix, she never got further than starting the car. At least, not till now.

She listened to the drumming quake of the sea breaking on the rocks at the entrance to the lagoon; a good sound to go with the doing of something stylish, gay and final. She turned over a card.
But all I said was, “Can I see your organ, Vicar?”!
Diana laughed, and the rattle in her lungs got mixed up with the sea’s thunder. Woodsmoke ballooned into the room in a sudden downdraught in the chimney. When she opened the kitchen door to clear the smoke, she had to fight the gale, forcing herself against it shoulder to shoulder.

Through the open door, she could see the waves racing in from the sea, the wind raising hackles of surf from their tops like porcupine quills. She wrestled the door shut and stood leaning against it, making a list in her head. She’d need to buy some tights. She’d better take the torch, and a couple of travelling rugs, and her old tennis shoes.

Loading the car, she saw her arrival very clearly.
Calliope
was parked in a harbour much like St Cadix, and George was downstairs, writing. His baseball cap wagged up at the sound of footsteps on the deck, and she was saying, “I just thought I had some talking to do on my own account.” At three, she locked the cottage and climbed the track in first gear, with the bonnet of the car weaving as the rear wheels spun in mud.

When the first gale warning was issued, on the 24th, George ran
Calliope
up to the top of a narrow creek on the western neck of Southampton Water. She floated—and then only just—for an hour on either side of high water; for the rest of the time she lay cradled in pungent black ooze. Bubbles of gas broke on the oily surface around her and stiff-legged curlews left their footprints outside her portholes. George put both anchors out and roped the boat to the trees on the windward shore. At the height of the gale, he loafed below in the saloon, with the charcoal fire drawing nicely, the end of
Great Expectations
within sight, as content with his squelchy berth as a hippo.

He got ashore in the dinghy by hauling himself hand over hand across the mud on a mooring rope. Carrying Vera’s bag of many colours, he walked through the fringe of trees, across a boggy field and into a council estate, where a gang of native children scowled and jeered when he nodded his head and smiled at them as he used to smile his way through the shantytowns of Montedor.

In the telephone kiosk on the corner, the line was dead and the gale blew through the smashed windows. George avoided looking at the small pile of human dung at his feet. Where once there had been a mirror there was now a naked square of hardboard on which someone had scrawled FUCK BLACK PIGS—NF and drawn a swastika with its legs going the wrong way round.

He walked for more than half an hour through a landscape of spraygunned concrete towers before he tracked down a working telephone, from which he called a taxi. When it came, the man stared at him and rudely demanded his fare in advance. The same thing happened at the new hotel near the cathedral in Winchester, where George asked for a single room with a bath. When he said “bath” he watched the girl at Reception fight a losing battle with a snigger.

“I’m living on a boat nowadays, you see,” George said. The girl didn’t soften her expression by a whisker. He paid her with
a fifty-pound note and was shown up to a narrow cupboard hardly bigger, at first sight, than the TV set which was the room’s defining feature. He opened the door of the tiny bathroom to the sea-like roar of an odour-extractor-fan. He parked Vera’s bag on the bed and descended to the street in a lift full of foggy muzak.

He found a barber’s and had his hair shampooed and cut and his beard trimmed. George had never taken proper bearings on his beard before. He studied it in the barber’s looking glass with agreeable surprise. Diana had said it was pure silver, and so it was—a birdsnest of bright fusewire. Listening, lulled, to the steady chip-chip-chip of the man’s scissors, he watched himself being sculpted like a hedge. When it was finished, he peered at his face from all sides, gazing at the beard with frank admiration, as if it was the property of somebody else altogether. It had the distinct look of C.-in-C. Western Approaches about it.

“Makes you look a different man, sir,” the barber said. The deference was new and spoken to the beard. George tipped the man five pounds for fixing this lightning promotion.

Bathed, kitted out in his shoregoing suit, flashing the points of his admiral’s beard, he was cock of the walk in the hotel lounge, where he strode through an early package tour of Americans, left his key at Reception and ordered a taxi to Tadfield.

They raced past windblown fields and stands of frantically gesticulating trees. Landspeed was dizzying, too fast for the eye to keep up, after the steady, encroaching motion of a boat on the sea. Searching for a point of focus, some reliable horizon, George settled on a flock of herring gulls, battling against the gale as they followed a plough on a brown hillside.

The journey to Tadfield (he remembered it as a long, slow summer drive through crooked lanes) took less than ten minutes from the Winchester suburbs, and when they reached it George was completely foxed.

“Are you
sure?”
he said to the driver. He saw a minimarket, a video club and a terrace of breezeblock Costa del Sol-style
houses with windy balconies and carports where there should have been a hummocky common of gorse and bracken. He left the car to wait for him on the forecourt of a pub that looked all wrong but had the right name.

Only the church was the same. The same old appeal was going on for the restoration of the roof. A battered cardboard thermometer, roped to a pole and flapping dangerously, showed the fund standing at £2,150. The colours were running from the thumbtacked notice which said something about Bingo. Bingo, indeed. His father wouldn’t have cared for that.

Inside, the smell was as he remembered; a dark, clammy, musty smell of creosote and old bones. His footsteps ringing on the stone, he walked down the aisle to the family pew and knelt there, on a new blue hassock, his hands clasped under his beard. The wind was fussing in the rafters and the Mothers Union banner stirred in the draughts of heavy, ecclesiastical air. Something was missing, though. George sniffed. There wasn’t any incense in it now. He guessed that the bingo-playing rector must be Low.

His father’s voice droned with the wind in the arches and up in the beams. He was still going on about Agape and Eros. The congregation had its thoughts on Sunday dinner. George shut his ears to the sermon and studied the Table of Kindred and Affinity in the prayer-book. He toyed with the notion of marrying his grandmother, his wife’s father’s sister or his brother’s son’s wife. He transferred his gaze from the small print to the tantalizingly exposed ridge of Vivienne Beale’s brassiere-strap under her jumper. He wondered if girls ever farted. He supposed that they must, sometimes; a liberating thought. He tried to imagine Vivienne Beale farting, and couldn’t.