Free Foreign Land by Jonathan Raban

She hadn’t struck him as the ally type.
    Outside the car, he could hear the sea burbling and suckingat the rocks a hundred feet below. Beyond the single tall chimneypot on the cottage roof, the Atlantic clouds were racing in the sky, but the headland shielded this side of the estuary from the west wind and the air was quiet.
    “What a marvellous position,” Diana Pym said.
    “Yes. At least, in the mornings. Night seems to start around lunchtime when the sun goes over the top of the hill.”
    “You have a garden, too?”
    “In theory.” He had not worked out where the garden ended and the common land of gorse, dead bracken and knobby granite outcrops began. At the back of the cottage he’d found some cabbages that had run wild and looked as if they were trying to turn into trees, three broken cloches and a variety of bamboo canes with loops of green twine hanging from them. They must have supported something once.
    They walked through a soft and smelly mulch of rotten pine needles. At the door, George ferreted for his keys while Diana Pym looked at the brass dolphin doorknocker.
    “That was another of my father’s ideas,” George said.
    “It’s rather handsome.”
    “You’ll have to excuse me, I’m afraid; I’m still just camping out here. I’m waiting for my stuff to come by ship and the place has been pretty well derelict since my mother died.”
    George wished, suddenly, that he had not invited her in. He didn’t want anyone else to see Thalassa. The house shamed him. His parents’ houses always had shamed him; he couldn’t walk through their doors without feeling surly and half-grown, dropping ten, then twenty, now more than forty years, as he faced up to their familiar, doggish clutter.
    “What can I get you? Basically, I’ve just got vodka, Scotch or gin—”
    “Scotch will be fine. With a little water, please.”
    The bottles were still in the cardboard box in which they’d been delivered by the off-licence. George allowed Diana Pym a measure which he thought she should be able to finish in ten minutes at the outside. For himself he poured a tall anaesthetic slug, and topped Diana Pym’s glass up with water until it wason the same level as his own.
    “Who is this? A relation?” She was standing in front of a portrait of a woman sitting at a writing desk. The paint of the woods in the background had oxidised badly. The heavy gilt frame was chipped. The picture was far too big for the room.
    “Oh, some remote cousin on my father’s side. My father used to call it ‘the Gainsborough’. It’s not, of course. I doubt if it’s even eighteenth century.”
    He felt trapped by the Pym-woman. Glass in hand, she was touring the room as if it was a museum. Trust him to let in the village quidnunc. She peered in turn at each of the eight portrait miniatures in one large frame.
    “All Greys?”
    “I imagine so. My father was always getting left things by his great aunts. Being the clergyman of the family, he was a sort of natural receptacle for ancestral junk. They never left him any money.”
    She had moved on to a rough-cut pane of Cornish slate on which had been painted a galleon cruising ahead under full sail. It was attached to a pin on the wall by a leather thong. An old Easter palm was propped behind it.
    “That’s not an heirloom,” George said. He took a long swallow of Scotch to curb his temper; the whisky burned his throat.
    “It’s odd, isn’t it—inheriting things? They never seem to fit.” She was now making a short-sighted study of a Victorian sampler. It had once hung in his bedroom when he was a child, and George knew it by heart. Decorated with a random assortment of faded dogs, trees, flowers and boats, it made two attempts at an embroidery alphabet, then launched into verse: “A Damsel of Philistine race/ In Samson’s Heart soon found a Place/ But Ah when She became his Bride/ She prov’d a Thorn to Pierce his Side”. It was signed “Eliz. Catherine Grey—Aged 12