Foreign Land

by Jonathan Raban

  “Eros,” his father said. Distracted for a second, George saw a stone imp with a bow and arrow. Agape sounded vaguely like some sort of tropical fish.

  He looked up to find that his father was staring straight at him, singling him out; and in his father’s face there was something that George had never seen there before—a look of troubled, sorrowful fraternity.

  He got up stiffly from the pew and walked down the suddenly empty church to the pulpit steps. He climbed into the little wooden crow’s nest, stood in front of the lectern and leaned forward, hands gripping the rails.

  “Dearly beloved brethren,” George said in the affectedly resonant voice that his father used for talking in church. The words were echoed by the wind outside. The pulpit felt far higher than it looked from the pews, and lonelier, too. He looked down on the thin scattering of resigned faces, and saw his own, out there in the seventh row, cast in a supercilious schoolboy smile, a trace of pale down on its upper lip. He felt mocked in his eminence. Nobody listened to you, not really, when you talked from the pulpit; you were here to bore people and be misunderstood.

  He was glad to get out into the open air. He walked across the churchyard to a row of fresh graves and stood numbly in front of a stone which said:

  VIVIENNE JOANNA BEALE

  1925-1983

  ABSENT IN BODY BUT PRESENT IN SPIRIT

  1 Cor. v.3

  There were some dead flowers in a jar on the pink quartz chips. So she’d never married. Cancer, presumably, had got her at 58. That was strange as well: George had always thought she was a year older, not a year younger, than himself. She hadn’t even rated an “In Loving Memory”, just that stony quotation from St Paul, poor bitch.

  He saw his father marching through the nettles round the side of the church. He was dressed for the wedding, in full regalia, togged out in white and purple and scarlet and gold.

  “Daddy—” George said.

  “Cut!” shouted Mr Haigh, and a cloud of rooks exploded from the dead elm on boxy wings.

  The taxi was waiting. George told the man to drive him back to Winchester, where he gathered his things from the hotel room before returning to the boat.

  Now he was ready to go. Calliope was connected to the ground by a single anchor. George sat in the saloon listening to the intestinal slurps and rumbles of the mud around the hull as it yielded the boat, inch by inch, to the rising water.

  28th March. 1005. Sea Area Thames. Wind, W 5 locally 6. Visibility good. Bar. 1003mb., rising more slowly.

  Tom was doing a steady 65 down the M3 in Trev’s old Commer van. It had taken most of yesterday to find Trev, and then he’d had trouble with the pews. They rattled in the back, half a churchful of them, all solid oak and nicely carved.

  He liked driving on the motorway. Once you were in the middle lane with your foot three-quarters down on the pedal, you could let your thoughts wander. Sometimes fifty miles went by without Tom noticing, he was so lost in one of his wrangles. Sometimes he sat alone in the cab arguing with Sheila, sometimes he told stories, sometimes he got hold of an idea and argued it out with himself.

  Which was what he was doing today. Trade, he thought, as he drove through the contraflow system round the road works at Sunbury. By Exit 2, he was away, driving on automatic and taking a leisurely stroll round the grand and ornamental garden of his brain.

  The thing about Trade was … Everything was in the wrong place. You wanted coffee, it was in Brazil. Or take oil. It was in the Arabian desert, or deep down under the North Sea. Asparagus was in Worcestershire—the wrong place again. What traders did was move things from the wrong place to the right place.

  Like the pews. They’d come from a church that was being knocked down in Battersea. As long as they stayed in SW11 they were worth no more than the wood they were made of. But outside of Shaftesbury, there was a bloke turning an old barn into a restaurant. He was crying out for church pews. Shaftesbury, just now, was the right place for pews. With every mile they travelled from London, Tom could feel their value accumulating behind him in the van.

  It was just a question of knowing, of getting intelligence about what needed to be moved where. Sometimes it was done on a nod and a wink basis. Sometimes you needed to do divination. Tom had brought his divining pendulum, just in case he needed it to find Sheila’s dad.

  Trade. If you squinted at the world right, there was the secret of all that restlessness and motion. Refrigerated lorries full of fish from Grimsby, Russian ships with guns for South America, planeloads of food and blankets for the starving people in Africa, hurtling newspaper vans taking city corners on two wheels … everything was travelling because it was in the wrong place. The fizz and energy of it all was staggering; and it was Traders—like Tom—who kept things spinning, faster and faster, round the spinning globe, moving them into their right places, in vans and ships and trains and planes.

  The theory worked with people, too. Think of the Israelites in the Bible, when they were in Egypt. The wrong place. When Moses started marching them across the Red Sea to the promised land, he was taking a trader’s risk. What were they worth in Egypt, under the old pharaohs? Sod all. What were they worth in the promised land? Look at the Rothschilds.

  An exit sign to Camberley went by. He was thinking of Sheila’s dad. He was in the wrong place, all right. In Africa, with the baobab trees, you could have put a value on him. But not in England. He was like pews going to rot in Battersea, or coals heaped up, unshipped, in Newcastle. Travelling round in his boat sending postcards, he was like one of those cargoes that get hawked about from port to port with no likely buyers. You’d need to put some hard thought into working out the right place for Sheila’s dad; one thing was certain, as far as Tom was concerned, and Sheila too, really—it wasn’t Clapham.

  Still, there was plenty of time to divine that. So long as he was out of the house before Tom’s daughter was born. Which was another thing. Sheila didn’t know she was going to have a girl, but Tom did. She liked the not knowing, so he’d divined it when she was asleep, holding the pendulum over the little bulge of her pregnancy. There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt about it: it had gone backwards and forwards, steady as a clock. A boy would have made it go round and round. So he had to watch himself now: he was always wanting to say “she” and remembering just in time to say “it”.

  Someone had said once that dust was matter in the wrong place.

  Tom took the A303 at the end of the motorway. The countryside looked as spick and span as a new toy in the buttery morning light. Grazing sheep stood in the puddles of their shadows, and the sun, shining on a chalky hill, made the grass wink and ripple like the Serpentine. The only thing missing was skylarks. Tom saw a jay, two kestrels, a magpie and a big brown hawk that looked like somebody’s overcoat out for a spin on its own. He reckoned it must be a buzzard of some sort. Beyond Andover he stopped for petrol and took in a few deep and happy lungfuls of high-octane country air.

  He reached Shaftesbury before noon and found the barn. The bloke helped him to unload the pews from the back of the van and paid in tenners. Tom stood in the sun, counting off the stack of notes. He liked money—the snakeskin feel of the paper, the finicky printed pictures. Like the one of Florence Nightingale and the moustached man with the bandaged head sitting up in bed in the Crimea. He’d asked Sheila once, “What’s on the back of a ten pound note?” She’d never noticed, which was odd since writers were supposed to be observant.

  But then money was only a symbol. It was like everything else—you had to keep it on the move to make it work for you. A roll of the stuff in your back pocket was just lazy money. Think. Tom leaned against the side of the van, wrinkling his eyes against the light. What was going cheap in Dorset that people in London would give their eye-teeth for? It came to him in a stroke: the answer was all round him, in the sweet, animal, country smell of the air in his nose. He walked back to the barn and called to the bloke inside. “Hey, d’you know a place where I could pick up a ton or two of ho
rse manure?”

  It was nearly three o’clock before he was on his way again, with the van windows wound down to let out the pong. He stopped briefly at Fontmell Magna, where he saw a British Legion Bazaar going on in the parish hall. He bought a pair of old weighing scales with nice brass weights, a home-made fruit cake for Sheila and a fluffy monkey for his daughter.

  At Weymouth he drove along the quay, past the moored yachts and the Sealink ferries, to the harbourmaster’s office. The harbourmaster was talking to a ship on his radio mike, saying Roger and Over rather more often than Tom suspected was strictly necessary. He looked at the photographs that were pinned to the fibreboard wall—black and white ones of old wrecks, coloured ones of a lifeboat in rough seas.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m looking for a boat with two masts. There’s an old bloke on it. On his own—”

  “Calliope. Name of … Grey? G. Grey?”

  “Yes,” Tom said, surprised by how quick the harbourmaster was on the uptake.

  “There was a lady in last night, looking for him. Is she connected with you?”

  “No,” Tom said. “I don’t think so.” Not unless he meant Sheila. But he couldn’t mean Sheila. It took some of the bloom off the expedition to find that he wasn’t alone on it.

  “We went through it all then. He left here on the … 23rd, before the gale. I tried calling the Coastguard. He hasn’t reported in to them since the 22nd, when he left Lyme Regis. They put out a call for him on the VHF, but couldn’t raise him yesterday. He’s probably sitting out on a mooring somewhere darning his socks. How long’s he been out of touch, then?”

  “Not all that long,” Tom was thinking of the stream of postcards; it would be stretching it a bit to say that Sheila’s dad had really been out of touch at all.

  “I wouldn’t fuss yourself. They’re a funny lot, the single-handers. Especially the old fellers. They’re always disappearing and cropping up again in places where you least expect them. Bane of my life.”

  “I’ll go further down the coast,” Tom said. “Try there.”

  “You’d be looking for a needle in a haystack. He’ll be in the Solent now. You’d have to go to Lymington, Yarmouth, Cowes, Buckler’s Hard, Hamble, Pompey, Chichester Harbour—and I haven’t even started.” He wore the broad complacent smile of the man who’s sorry but can’t help.

  “I’ll have to work it out,” Tom said.

  “The lady who was in here looking for him. She had the look of someone. That singer who used to be on the television. Julie Whatsername.”

  “Yeh?”

  “Nightfall,” the harbourmaster said.

  Tom took himself off to a café on the seafront, where he sat with a cup of weak tea, staring at the road atlas. Some kids were playing on the Pac-Man machine, which was keeping up a steady gobble-gobble-bleep of electronic noise. He got out his divining pendulum.

  It was an old King Edward aluminium cigar tube, really. Tom had filled the bottom of it with molten lead and drilled a hole in the screw cap. He’d tied a length of nylon fishing line to a shirt button and threaded it through the hole. Letting the pendulum dangle on six inches of line, he held it over the atlas.

  He was thinking a bit about Sheila’s dad, but mostly he was thinking of the boat. He thought: oak, larch, teak, mahogany.

  The pendulum gave a definite tremble over Christchurch, but that was probably just an old echo, like the useless twitch that it made over Weymouth itself. He moved it along the coastline, almost touching the map with it, concentrating. Tom shut his eyes. He felt the pendulum quiver—like a tiny electric shock. Then it started to swing in steady circles, round and round and round and round, the nylon tugging between his thumb and forefinger. Tom looked to see where it was on the atlas. It was left of Southampton.

  He put the pendulum away and finished his tea. On the way back to the van he saw a rack of postcards in a shop. He bought We can’t have that dangling—it’ll have to come off! to send to Trev.

  28th March. 1015. Sea Area Wight. Wind W, veering NW, 4-5. Visibility good. Bar. 1008mb., rising.

  In Lymington, Diana slammed the car door shut and went out to brave another dreary yacht marina. They were all the same—the same demented cowbell noise of metal rigging banging into metal masts, the same breezy good old boys in faded denims and braided captains’ hats. The marinas were uglier by far than the caravan sites. Every once-pretty river was spoiled by them. Where there had been rushbeds as thick as harvest corn, and seapink and milkwort and herb robert, there was now just pontoon on pontoon of expensive plastic toys. She must have seen millions of pounds’ worth of them already—idle, charmless things that tinkled in the wind and looked like nothing so much as dollops of fiddled income tax.

  She had woken in the hotel room at Poole feeling tired, helpless, out of place. The morning sun had robbed her quest of point and shadow. Over the Nescafe and stale croissant that passed for a “continental breakfast”, it looked a poor sad thing, too naked to face without a wince of embarrassment. This chasing after George only succeeded in making Diana seem more fractured, more incomplete to herself. Better to go botanising alone for lichens, or stay up all night waiting for the liquid wink of badgers’ eyes in the grotto.

  The lusts of the flesh draw us to rove abroad; but when the time is past, what earnest thou home but a burdened conscience and a distracted heart?

  Yes, but the trouble was that she was haunted by the dangerous line. Without a friend, thou canst not well live.

  So she paid her bill with a mint American Express card and plugged on from marina to marina, putting the same unhopeful question at every place.

  She opened the door of the blue Portakabin that served as an office. “I am looking,” she said, as she always said, “for a yacht called Calliope.”

  28th March. 1020. Sea Area Dover. Wind W, 5-6. Visibility good. Bar. 1003mb., rising.

  George had sailed through the night, cat-napping when he could. The swell left by the gale was still running, in steep black hills as cleanly contoured as desert dunes. They came racing from behind in the dark, seizing the boat in exhilarating swoops and plummetings. He found Antares on the sky, and tried to keep it in the starboard shrouds. With the wind astern and the swell on the quarter, the sea gathered him in and swept him headlong up the Channel.

  At ten in the morning he found the Rye fairway buoy. The swell was breaking on the shallow sand of the bay and George was wary of tackling the harbour entrance. He called the harbourmaster on the radio. No problem, the voice said: there was plenty of water, the approach was to be taken carefully on 329°, and George was to moor at the piles below the office before going on upriver to the town.

  He clung to the bearing and watched the needle on the echo sounder sink lower and lower down the face of the dial. He could see surf ahead, stained brown with sand, and a wooden dolphin marking the entrance to the harbour. Calliope switch-backed in the swell. He hadn’t eaten for … he couldn’t remember when. He felt too jumpily alert for his own good. 325°. 334°. 329°. He locked the boat on the magic number and saw the surf part to disclose a narrow, canal-like avenue of smooth water dead ahead.

  A man in uniform was waiting to take his ropes at the piles.

  “Thanks,” George said. “How much do I owe you?—I’m only staying for one night—” and saw that the man was not the harbourmaster but a customs officer.

  “If I might come aboard, sir?” He was already there; a heavy man whose big pink marshmallow face looked innocently mismatched with the black serge and the clipboard that made up the rest of him. “Come far today?”

  “Just from the Solent.”

  “And where, exactly, on the Solent, sir, did you come from?”

  “Oh … Southampton Water. The Itchen side. Eling, I think it was called.”

  “When did you leave?”

  “About six o’clock last night.”

  “And what sort of weather did you have, sir?”

  George shrugged. “You know. Much like it i
s now.”

  “You tell me, sir.”

  “Why the interrogation?”

  “It’s not an interrogation. I’m just curious, sir.”

  “The wind was westerly, Force 4. Heavy swell from the sou’west. Visibility good. I was able to steer by the stars.”

  The man was making notes with a biro. George’s temper was fraying, but he ached to be rid of the man’s officious bulk and felt that compliance was the safest route.

  “This is a big boat for one man to handle on his own, isn’t it, sir?”

  “I manage.”

  “D’you mind if I have a look-see below?”

  “No.”

  But all the warmth and friendliness of the saloon vanished with the man’s presence there. George felt he was watching his life being burgled before his eyes. He saw the saloon as the man saw it: its untidy scatter of books and discarded clothes, the empty whisky tumbler, the unplumped cushions, the cracked case of the transistor radio, the saucepan which had dislodged itself from the galley and fallen under the saloon table. The man was looking at Vera’s picture.

  “Nice woodwork, sir.”

  He opened lockers and drawers. In the forecabin, he rummaged through George’s socks and underpants. He lifted a floorboard and found the wine cellar in the forward bilges.

  “Duty paid on these, sir?”

  George pointed to the name of the English shipper on a bottle of Pomerol. The man nodded and turned to the chain locker.

  George said: “You’ll find a tin full of money there, under a pile of chain.”

  “Will I, sir?” The man’s eyes were as bland as a pair of poached eggs. He opened the locker door and reached inside. “Feels as if you’ve got a bit of a soft patch in the stem here …”