Foreign Land

by Jonathan Raban

  “Don’t worry. It always takes one a while to find one’s sea-legs. You’re doing very well.” He was looking at the sea, not at her, and she found herself irrationally resenting his distracted attention.

  “I can’t see the land any more.”

  “Oh, you’re much safer out of sight of land. There’s less to bump into.”

  “Just you.”

  “Yes—” He laughed; a light, dry, naval man’s laugh. “There’s always me, of course.”

  “Do you know where we are?”

  “Just … there.” He leaned over from the wheel and pointed to a pencilled cross—one of many—on the chart. It was an inch or two away from a diagonal line which stretched out across a white sea dotted with small printed numbers.

  “Are these … fathoms?”

  “No, metres.” He looked over her shoulder at the chart. “Thirty-two metres. That’s about a hundred feet.”

  “Is that all?” She was disappointed. “It feels … much deeper,” she said, and immediately felt silly for saying it. But George Grey said, “Yes, doesn’t it?” and she watched the silver bristles round his mouth catch the sun as he smiled. “I always think that’s the best part—the feeling of all that water underneath.”

  “Doesn’t it sometimes scare you?”

  “Oh, yes. I suppose that’s really its point.”

  It had begun to scare Diana. Even wedged in the seat by the chart table, she was having to cling on tight to stop herself from falling as the boat rolled and wallowed. The little pointed waves had changed into long furrows and ridges of sea with dribbling crests of foam.

  “When do we turn round?”

  “We turned. Ten minutes ago.”

  “Did we?” The sea looked just the same. “But the sails—they’re out on the same side of the boat.”

  “Yes, I eased off the sheets; we’re running now.”

  He was snowing her with salty talk. Do I trust this man? The boat slewed, plunged downwards, and came up bobbing like the guillemot. Diana thought: I hardly even know the guy. She saw a wave building up behind them. It was big, untidy, all lumps and bulges. At its top, the water was being churned into frothy cream. This isn’t me. The wave was moving faster than the boat: it came rolling up and under the back end, lifting them so that Diana felt her stomach drop and saw the sky slide down.

  “Arthur,” George Grey said, spinning the spokes of the wheel.

  “What?” She heard the shake in her voice.

  “You call the big ones Arthur. It helps to make them feel smaller.”

  She laughed. Too loud. Too madly. “Every wave looks like Arthur to me.”

  “It’s a bit sloppy. But the boat’s quite happy.”

  “It’s nice to know that someone is. Oh God—Arthur’s big brother is right behind us.”

  George laughed. The boat rolled on its side as if it was going to go right over, and came up straight again, leaving Diana clinging to the strap above her head.

  “She’s looking after us very nicely indeed,” George said.

  “Well,” Diana said, at least an octave above her normal pitch, “anyway, I’m not throwing up. I think that’s about all that can be said for me.”

  “You see—you’re a natural sailor.”

  She wasn’t reassured. It was quite possible, she thought, that George Grey was crazy—really and truly crazy, like the people who told you, in the flattest, most commonsensical way, that they were reincarns, or God, or extra-terrestrial visitors. The man’s voice was somehow too dangerously normal for the circumstances.

  “How close are we to land?” she said.

  “Oh … not far now.” He was smiling.

  The waves were overtaking the boat like badly wrapped parcels. The sea flared and collapsed under her feet. Diana felt her old dread surfacing in her like a forgotten friend. She recognized it with a rush of panic.

  There’d been a time when the world felt like this most Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, or Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays; a time when Diana couldn’t hear of an aeroplane taking off with a friend in it without seeing it crash. Wherever she went, she brought with her a sense of imminent catastrophe. If she sat in a bar among the other drinkers, she saw cancers, automobile accidents, cardiac arrests, murders and suicides. Her dreams were full of deaths, sometimes her own, more often those of friends, acquaintances, total strangers. She saw the mailman dead in a dream; in another, Bobby Kennedy was shot six months before it happened, and Diana felt sick with guilt when she saw it on Walter Cronkite; for one appalling day, she knew her dream had somehow caused the real assassination.

  That was when she started going to Dr Nussbaum. He helped a little. Later, she found Father McKinley, who had helped a lot. The low ceiling of dread, under which she lived like a crouched animal, slowly lifted. Inch by inch, corner by corner, until she began to breathe again. Supermarkets were her worst places. She had to dare herself to enter them, and by the time she reached the checkouts she was sometimes trembling so violently that no-one would share the line with her. In the Piggly Wiggly one morning she realized that the ceiling was gone. That was all over. Never, please God, would she ever feel like that again.

  Now, to her horror, she was seeing George Grey dead. She couldn’t see how he was dead: it wasn’t an obvious thing like being drowned at sea. It was the bristles on his chin. They were going on growing. He was dead and his beard was alive. It was luxuriant, spreading, and the face behind it was like a lump of tallow, with an opaque coating of blue film over the open eyes.

  “Watch out, it’s Arthur again,” he said. “You’re doing fine.”

  Arthur was a relief. It made her hold on tight and think of nothing but sea as the boat rolled and slid over the breaking white top of the wave.

  “We touched seven and a half knots just then. I didn’t know she could do it. And that’s under sail alone.”

  Diana stared at the little numbers on the chart in front of her. If you really tried, you could manage your own mind as he was managing this boat. You could steer it away from danger and get home safely after all. She wasn’t a believer any more. She couldn’t pray, but she could still use the words. On the white paper sea of the chart she made words happen until they were almost as clear as if they’d been printed there. They were from Thomas à Kempis, her favourite. Once, she’d had great chunks of The Imitation of Christ off by heart. She could come up with some good fragments, even now.

  Without a friend, thou canst not well live … No, not that one. She focused on the chart again. The boat dived and aimed itself at the sky.

  Occasions of adversity best discover how great virtue or strength each man hath. For occasions do not make a man frail, but they show what he is. Here, men are proved as gold in a furnace …

  “A calliope’s a merry-go-round steam organ, isn’t it?” George Grey said.

  “What? Oh … yes, they have them at carnivals in California.”

  “This is more like a switchback, I’m afraid.”

  “Big Dipper.” On the chart she saw: If thou wilt withdraw thyself from speaking vainly, and from gadding idly, as also from hearkening after novelties and rumours, thou shalt find leisure enough for meditation on good things. The greatest saints avoided the society of men and did rather choose to live to God in secret. One said, “As oft as I have been among men, I returned home less of a man than I was before.” She thought: it’s OK, I’m in control.

  Yet every time she looked at it, the sea was scarier. It was sudsy and tumbled and shoreless. She wanted to ask what time George Grey expected to get home, but the look of the water made the question sound idiotic in her head; the noise of it, too, as it rushed at the hull and the wind went whining and crackling round the masts and rigging. Will we be back in time for tea? didn’t seem the thing to say.

  When they were in the dark trough of the next wave, he said, “It’s odd, you know …” His voice was flat, as if he was starting out on a technical lecture. “I didn’t know about Sheila … my daughter’
s baby until last night, when you told me. I was rather … rattled by it, in fact. She hadn’t said a word to me, but she goes round talking about it on the television.” He steered the boat up a long grey slope of foamy sea. “One wonders what one’s done to deserve it.”

  It is better oftentimes and safer that a man should not have many consolations in this life. She said: “Do you believe we ever deserve what we get?”

  “Oh, yes. Sometimes,” he said. “Things like income tax. Unfinished crosswords. Flat feet.”

  “When it comes to being mean, parents and children knock husbands and wives into a cocked hat.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I do deserve it, really. Don’t you loathe your ancestors? I do, and most of the poor sods were perfectly harmless.”

  “The ones in the pictures …”

  “Yes. It’s bloody awful, you know, to realize that you’re turning into an ancestor yourself. Bloody awful.”

  As the boat lurched suddenly sideways and she grabbed for the strap, she saw herself and George as two peas, rattling loosely in one pod. When they came upright again, she said, “I always wanted children.”

  “You … haven’t … ?”

  “No. I got pregnant when I was twenty-two. It was just when my first single was coming out. I had it aborted. They managed to louse up my … equipment.” She was amazed to hear those words hanging there in the wheelhouse, all mixed up with the noise of the sea. It was something she never spoke of to anyone. Why here? Why to him?

  “What was … the record?”

  “‘Please Don’t Write Me a Letter’.” She laughed—a long ripple of relief. “It must have been ahead of its time. It sold around nine copies.”

  “What foul luck.” He looked round at her for a moment. “And the father? Who was he?”

  “He was a conman.”

  “Fathers often are.”

  “He was my agent.”

  “Look—there’s your land. Over there.”

  She couldn’t see it at first. Then, between waves, she saw the greasy smear in the sky, far higher up than she’d expected. It was almost overhead. And it was on the wrong side. It wasn’t Cornwall at all. The boat rolled badly. She felt helplessly disoriented. He’d been playing some fool Alice in Wonderland trick on her all along.

  She said dully, “Is that … France?”

  “No, it’s the Head.”

  “St Cadix Head?” She didn’t believe him.

  “See the beacon? Up there, to the left?”

  It was true. He was right, but it still looked like another country. There were no houses, no trees. It was a misty mountain of granite. It didn’t look like anyone’s home, let alone hers. It was only when they moved into its shelter that she realized that it must have been raining heavily all afternoon. Out at sea it was as if there was no weather at all. Now she saw that it was one of those ordinary March days when you couldn’t see to the other side of the estuary; a day that would flood the stream in the garden and drown the early primroses.

  “How far out from land did we go?”

  “Oh, no distance, really. Two and a half miles, perhaps.”

  “I thought we were way out on the ocean.”

  “It always seems like that when the visibility gets bad.” He turned the wheel and the boat swung round in the calm, rain-pocked water, until the sails began to flap like lines of washing. When he left the wheelhouse to pull the sails down from the masts, she said, “Can I help?” but he said, “No—stay in the dry, there’s no point in both of us getting wet.”

  She enjoyed watching him working up at the front of the boat. As he gathered in the unruly sodden canvas, his big underlip jutting forward in an expression of angry concentration, he looked like a man fighting with eagles. His arms and head were tangled in the flailing sails—he was losing—then he conquered them. Binding them down to their wooden spar, he raised his head, checked the drifting land and smiled at Diana through the window; a hesitant, lopsided victor’s smile. His shirt-tail had come unstuck from his trousers and was wagging in the wind. She wanted to tuck it in for him.

  They motored up the estuary through the rain. Watching the slate roofs slide by, she found something illicit in this sailor’s view of the village. Between their setting out this morning and their coming home this afternoon, St Cadix seemed to have slipped off-centre, to have lost a measure of its reality. Diana inspected it with the kind of caution (wanting to believe in it, but alert to each false note) that she felt when the curtain went up on a stage set. She saw Jellaby’s van, parked like a prop on Lower Marine Drive. The gilt hands on the church clock were stuck (a hackneyed touch on the part of the designer) at twenty to eleven. The wet and rigid flag outside the Yacht Club was a shade too new; and Betty Castle, dismounting from her sit-up-and-beg bicycle by the post office, looked like a character in a tedious old-fashioned play.

  George, at the wheel, nodded at the waterfront. “There you are. Home Sweet Home …”

  “It doesn’t look real.”

  “Oh, it’s real enough, all right. Too bloody real for me. Do you know that bitch with the bicycle?”

  “Betty Castle.”

  “Yes. How does she manage to make herself so ubiquitous? She’s the genius of the place.”

  “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”

  “What?”

  “Practice, practice, practice.”

  The boat turned and held still on the incoming tide. George nursed it alongside the quay, nudging it into a slot between the scallop boats. He stepped ashore with an armful of rope; Diana went downstairs to put a kettle of water on the gas stove.

  The saloon smelled of the voyage. It had a strong swampy odour that she recognized as the smell that always hung around after one had enjoyed a dangerous pleasure. When George came back, he looked exhausted. His face was slack, his skin seemed translucent. There were raw grazes on his hands.

  He said: “I’m sorry. I’m afraid we got caught out there. My fault. I should’ve taken more notice of the barograph. Was it hell for you?”

  She was looking at the framed photograph of the fat black woman on the wall. “No …” she said. “It was … extraordinary. Like … dreaming.”

  “Yes,” he said, sounding vague. “But there was nothing wrong with the boat. She was perfect.”

  She was glad to see, when he poured whisky into tumblers, that his hand was shivering a little. Seeing her noticing, he said, “I always get the shakes after going to sea. Don’t know why. After I stood my first full watch alone … in a corvette … I had to be practically tied into my bunk, I was such a rattletrap.”

  Diana rummaged in her bag. She shook its contents out over the saloon cushions, as if she was sowing the twists of Kleenex, chapsticks, blunt pencils, keys, small change, empty match-books, the reel of measuring tape and the crumpled letter from Harry, like seeds.

  “What have you lost?”

  “My cigarettes.”

  “You haven’t smoked all day.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, finding them. “I’ll catch up.”

  The kettle came whistling to the boil. While Diana made coffee, George scribbled with a fountain pen in the black account book that he called “the ship’s log”. Later, he went upstairs and she was able to sneak a look at what he’d written. It wasn’t much.

  Arr. St Cadix 1640. Log: 0026.7. Wind S by W, 5 gusting to 6. Vis mod, then poor. Bar: 1019, falling rapidly. Check drip on sterngland. Renew jib halyard. Otherwise A-OK.

  Diana felt wounded. She didn’t figure in the story at all.

  “Someone,” said T. Jellaby, “is getting his leg over.”

  “So long as it’s not you,” Vic Toms said. Vic had come into the shop, after hours, to swap “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for “The Return of the Jedi”.

  “Captain Birdseye.”

  “Oh?” Vic was reading the label on the cassette. He was a careful man. Most people just looked at the title and the names of the stars. Vic went for the small print. He wanted to know
the directors and the cameramen and the people who did all the costumes and make-up and stuff. His lips moved when he read.

  “Yes,” T. Jellaby said. “That old reverend’s son. Up the hill.”

  “The one that’s got Dunnett’s boat?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I could have told him a thing or two about she, if he’d have asked. But he didn’t ask me. He got a surveyor down. From Plymouth.”

  “Old bugger’s knocking off Screwy Julie. You know. Down in Harmony Bay. Took her out today on that boat of his for a spot of jig-a-jig at sea. I watched them come in. Shagged out wasn’t the word for it. He must have had her from Christmas to breakfast time.”

  “She’s getting past it,” Vic Toms said, putting a pound down on the counter. “I went over she last fall. There was rot in the stempost. I told old Dunnett to get an X-ray on them keelbolts. Then he gets this surveyor in from Plymouth. He comes along with an itsy-bitsy hammer … Won’t find nothing that way. Dunnett said to me how much he ought to ask for she. ‘Not a lot,’ I said. ‘Not a lot.’” He laughed.

  “Eleven grand,” T. Jellaby said.

  “That’s what Dad told him. But Dad didn’t know nothing about the rot. He only knowed she when she was Tremlett’s boat.”

  “He only wants a floating knocking shop.”

  “He better not knock too hard, then. Not with all that soft wood in the stempost.”

  T. Jellaby snugged the pound note down in the till.

  “What was the name of the bloke that directed “2001”? Has he made any more?”

  “Search me,” T. Jellaby said.

  After Vic Toms had gone, T. Jellaby realized that Captain Birdseye had given him an idea for a video. He often got ideas for videos, but if you wanted to get into the video game seriously, you had to have a gimmick. Nobody, so far as he knew, had used a boat before. Suppose there was this boat … with three girls … One of them would be very fat. She’d be called “Skipper”. And they’d run it as a regular floating knocking shop. For old blokes, why not? One at a time. Like ocean cruises. The girls would dress up like sailors, in striped jerseys and bell-bottom trousers, then they’d strip off as soon as they were out of sight of land, and the old blokes, who thought they’d signed up for a trip round the bay, would go bananas with fright and lust.