Foreign Land by Jonathan Raban

with Tudor beams chamfered into the brickwork. Its dark windows reflected the careless turmoil of the garden like over-exposed negatives of film.
    It took a long time for Mrs Dunnett to come to the door. When she did open it, she stared, rather vaguely, over George’s shoulder as if she expected to see more of him coming up the drive.
    “Oh …” she said. Then: “Oh, yes. You want to see Wingco. You’d better come in.”
    The house had a married smell of cooked vegetables and unaired linen. It reminded George uncomfortably of the way that Thalassa used to smell when his father was alive. Mrs Dunnett stood in the hall of the bungalow as if it were she andnot George who was a total stranger to it. She stared with bulging eyes at the front door until George closed it. Then she gazed round her as if she couldn’t quite remember in which wing of the palace she had last noticed her husband.
    She was tall, with colourless skin and high cheekbones that stood out on her face like the arms of a crucifix. Her floral print dress was too vivid, too baggy and too short for her. One of Betty Whatsit’s castoffs?
    “Just wait a minute, will you?” She moved all of six feet into the room nearest to her and said, “Your man’s here, Wingco,” then to George, “Yes, he’s through there …”
    George followed her in to the room.
    “Oh, hullo—good of you to come,” said the wing commander from his armchair. He was small, pink and swaddled like a baby. The left half of his face was stiff; the right half smiled, showing teeth too white and regular to be real.
    “Cold, isn’t it, Mister … I don’t know your name,” Mrs Dunnett said.
    “Grey.”
    “Grey.” Then she said “grey” again, this time as if it was a description of his character rather than his name. “Do you take sugar with your tea?”
    “No thanks, I don’t.”
    “Oh, well that’s all right,” she said, and breezed from the room.
    “Sorry,” Dunnett said. “I can’t get up. At least I can, but …” He nodded at the open door. “Do … ah … ah …” he waved his right hand limply at a chair. “Old Toms called me. Said you’d looked over the boat.”
    “Yes,” George said. “She’s very pretty.”
    “No speed in her, of course. Won’t tack. But she’s what I call a gentleman’s yacht. Not like all those Tupperware things …”
    “Would you like to sell her?”
    “Oh …” Dunnett was watching the door. “Well she’s not up for sale, you know,” he said in a voice designed to carry. “We’re still thinking of upping sticks in her next summer.Going down to the Med. Or the Caribbean. My wife has friends in Florida. If only this—” he jerked his left hand—“would ease up a bit, we could be off.” He said
orf
, but it sounded unnatural in his mouth, as if he’d been taking elocution lessons from his wife.
    “I envy you,” George said, thinking how relieved he was to be himself and not the wing commander. The man must be his own age; he realized that he’d been thinking of him as if he was of the same generation as his father.
    “Given a stretch of decent weather … with the trade winds and everything … if the medicos gave one a clean bill of health … assuming one could find a buyer for the house … and put all one’s stuff in storage …” Dunnett was adding unlikelihood to unlikelihood with the air of a child building a house of cards for the sheer pleasure of seeing it collapse. “Do you know Florida?”
    “No, I’ve never been there.”
    “Nor me. Dreadfully hot in the summer, I gather. Moonrockets and Disneyland and all that.” He made a chirruping sound of disbelief.
    “And you’d sail all the way?” George said, plugging his advantage.
    “Well … I suppose … if things panned out …”
    Mrs Dunnett brought in tea on a tray. The silver pot looked ancestral, the china looked as if it might be Spode; but there was a bottle of milk in place of a jug, and the tray had smears of marmalade on