Free Foreign Land by Jonathan Raban Page B

… just a year or two ago …”
    “No way-”
    Diana Pym and Julie Midnight … They sat together on his mother’s sofa like twin pictures in a stereoscope, and he could not make them coalesce into a single image. Blink, and he sawone; blink, and the other had taken her place. It was true—Diana Pym had the wrists and eyes of Julie Midnight, the same slender boniness, the same stunned look. In any line of refugees, shuffling away from the scene of a catastrophe, the camera would instinctively single out that face. You would only have to see it for a moment before making out a cheque to the disaster fund. Yet Julie Midnight was Diana Pym: the kind of disaster she suggested was nothing more heart-stirring than an attack of greenfly.
    She—or they, rather, were saying: “I adore your slate floor. There’s one in my cottage, but it’s been covered over with a layer of concrete about a foot thick. One would need a pneumatic drill to get at it—”
    George, affronted by the thought of Julie Midnight with a pneumatic drill, said: “Yes. My father dug it out when my parents first moved here. He broke his hip on it a week later. After that he pointedly referred to it as ‘your floor’ to my mother. It was rather a bone of contention.”
    “You don’t seem to have liked your parents very much,” said Diana Pym.
    George found this remark unsettling. Its presumption was pure Pym, but the intimacy of the eyes that went with it was Midnight. The eyes won.
    “We just never knew each other terribly well,” he said. “I was in the Middle East, then Africa. They were in Hampshire, then here. We didn’t have a lot in common. I suppose we were all a bit baffled by each other when we met. I used to think we might have done better if we’d hired an interpreter.”
    “Well, everybody feels that, don’t they?” She lit a new cigarette from the butt of her last one. In the gauzy smoke, Midnight went out of focus and came back as Pym. The jaggedly cut ends of her white hair were coloured with nicotine and there was something creased and tortoiselike about her face. Too much weather, too little blood. Suppose she had been, say, thirty in 1960 … That would still put her only in her early fifties … Her alarming age made George feel shaky on his own account.
    “Anyway—” her head was turned away from him; she was looking again at the big, bad, dusty portrait of that distant female cousin with her quill pen and unfinished letter on her desk. “Your parents seem to have had the last word. You’ve come home.”
    “Late, as usual.”
    “Better late than never.” Trying to giggle, she began to cough—a deep crackling cough that sounded like a forest on fire.
    “Can I get you some water?”
    “No.” Her voice was a bass croak. “This part of Cornwall’s awful for bronchitis.”
    “You smoke too much,” George said, talking not to Diana Pym but to the girl on the screen in the forlorn hotel room. Diana Pym stared back at him, her blue eyes moist with coughing.
    “Yes,” she said. “I’ve never gone in for doing things by halves.”
    “Whatever brought you to St Cadix?”
    “Oh, the sea, I guess. I lived in Venice for a while. Venice, California. We were a block away from the ocean. There was a motel and a Burger King between us and it. You could just see a crack of Pacific from the bathroom window—it was about the same size as the toothbrush handle. Then I moved to Brittany, but there was a big hump of cliff and some iron railings and an ice cream kiosk. You couldn’t actually see the sea at all, there. Now it comes right up to my back garden. At spring tides, the cottage feels like a boat on the water.”
    “You had friends here?”
    “No. I saw a picture of it in a magazine. It looked kind of
dinky.”
She sat hunched intently forward, listening to herself. “It gave me a job. The house was a ruin, the garden was just rocks and turf. In the first year I was out at nights digging, with a Tilley lamp hung