Foreign Land

CHAPTER ONE It was a shadowless London morning; a grudged measure of twilight between darknesses. They breakfasted under a bare 150-watt bulb. Sheila worked her passage through a plate of All Bran, Tom drank coffee from a mug with a thick and warty glaze. The window of the tall room at the back of the house showed a lawn of fallen plane leaves, a clogged birdbath, a torn fence, and then the city, lying far below them like a lake. It was thunderously still and black. Sheila held her father's letter, a single sheet of onionskin. "He's coming back. For good, he says." Tom was staring at the stamp on the envelope. There was a flag, with some gaudy Third World heraldry on it, a sword, a fishing boat, a torch, some sort of tree. "Great," Tom said, losing the word in his beard. He went on looking at the stamp. Then, "Why?" "What do you mean, why? He's sixty." "I thought he might be ill. Or something." "Oh, he isn't coming here. He'll go to my gran's old house in Cornwall. That's why he kept it on." "Is that a baobab tree, do you reckon?" "I've no idea. Probably. I suppose that's what they have out there.'' "Is that what you want?" Tom said. "I don't see that it really makes much difference. London to Cornwall is as far in time as London to Bom Porto." "Bom Porto," Tom said with a faint snuffle. It was difficult for anyone to pronounce the name of the place where her father lived as if they meant it seriously. At least his transfer to St Cadix would solve that problem. "It's his deathbed repentance. It has to be a wrong move. He can't know England any more. It's a foreign country. What'll he do here? He's got some chocolate-boxy picture in his head of spreading elms and village pubs and thatch with everything. Poor old bugger." "Perhaps he's just fed up with the heat." Sheila laughed. Tom, surprised, smiled at pleasing her so easily. "Yes, that's what this country's for. It's a place where people come to cool off." Tom watched her, his lips moving slightly behind his Mr Rat whiskers. He got up from the breakfast table that he'd carpentered when he first moved in. Sitting at it, feeling its bare grain under her fingertips, she felt soothed by its weightiness. "Do you want me to go to the shops first? Or fix the van?" "Shops," she said. "Okay," said Tom. His extraordinary specific gravity made the room seem to float as he left it. Sheila carried her mail up to the study at the top of the house. It was a room too small for Tom. He always stopped at the doorway unless he'd come to repair something. Tom had built the bookshelves: a honeycomb of varnished oak to replace the piles of bricks and boards that Sheila had made for herself. Tom installed the telephone answering machine. Tom framed and hung the pictures on the walls. He had created this working place for her, then gone below. She noticed that when he did come to her study, he dipped his head and gathered his great shoulders together in embarrassment, like a man in church. She would lend him books from the shelves, and he'd carry them cautiously off in hands as big as a pair of garden spades. She could hear him now, rumbling somewhere downstairs like a passing underground train. She needed his bass accompaniment in order to work; had come to depend on his noises, of banging and sawing and drilling, and smells, of machine oil, turpentine and pine dust. Sometimes she would go down at the end of the day and find whole walls gone and Tom, looking huge and rimed, saying "Is that what you want?" Yes, on the whole; though it was still hard to be sure of what Tom wanted. There were days when she found his consoling presence in the house perfectly inexplicable,Raban, Jonathan is the author of 'Foreign Land', published 2001 under ISBN 9780375725944 and ISBN 0375725946.