Foreign Land

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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.”

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