Foreign Land (33 page)

Dep. St Cadix Hr. 0615. Log 0037.3. Course set: 093°. Bar 1002, rising (?). Calm. Vis—

He stopped here, for the vis. was definitely rum. It looked alright—it seemed as if you could see for miles and miles under this bland and steadily brightening sky. The trouble was that half the local headlands had gone absent without leave. The day mark on St Cadix Head was clear enough: he could even see the paint moulting on its red stripes. But where were Nare Head, the Dodman, Greeb Point? They’d vanished clean off the face of Cornwall—and where they should have been there was just sea, innocently shining, placid as a carp pool in the grounds of a ruinous abbey.

He held the little handbearing compass to his eye and squinted through it at the daymark, watching the numbers spin in their dish of damping fluid. They settled, wobbling a little, at 282°, then climbed to 285° and past 290°. At 294°, St Cadix Head faded out into a clear horizon. George read the log:
Calliope
had travelled just over a mile between the first bearing and the moment when the headland had dissolved into the sky.

He sat at the chart table, ruling off the bearings from the daymark together with his course and distance travelled. The elementary, elemental triangle gave George a deep twinge of reminiscent childish pleasure. There wasn’t really much, he supposed, that he was awfully good at; but he was good at this—this magical monkey business with protractors, soft pencils and heavy old boxwood parallel rules. The only nickname he’d ever had was on
Hecla
, when they’d called him Oz (after “The Wizard of Oz” with Judy Garland had been screened on the flight deck one balmy Saturday night off Cape St Vincent). Oz might have got a little rusty since, but he still remembered most of his old tricks.

“That’s our position, sir,” he said aloud in the empty wheelhouse, drawing a neat circle round the cross at the bottom of the triangle and labelling it with the time and log reading. His Known Point of Departure. From now on, unless the vis. cleared, he’d have to go by Dead Reckoning.

“Dead Reckoning, gentlemen, was good enough for Columbus, so don’t despise it. You won’t be called on to discover
America with it, but—ah, good
morning
, Mr Grey!”

“Morning, sir. I’m sorry, sir.” Commander Prynne watched him in silence as George shuffled in to the empty chair beside Cadet Carver.

“Mr Grey, we were just discussing that primitive old seaman’s solace, next in importance only to his rum ration, Dead Reckoning.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Indeed …” Prynne whiffled happily at his class; “we might do a little experiment in Dead Reckoning with the, ah, unfortunate case of Mr Grey.”

The classroom was still called The Little Folks Den, a survival from 1939 when Pwllheli had been a Butlin’s Camp. All four walls were decorated with a waist-high frieze of grinning gollywogs. Above the gollywogs were pinned sheaves of Admiralty orders. The furled blackout curtains in the windows were pale with chalk dust. George stared at the blank page of his Nav. Notebook, fearing to catch old Prynne’s housemasterly eye.

“To start our DR track, we have to know one thing only. Our Known Point of Departure. Where, in other words, did we start
from?
”

George, obedient to a fault, wrote: “1. Known Point of Departure.” For a hopeful moment, he thought Prynne had forgotten him.

“Mr Grey?”

“Sir?”

“Your place of birth, please, Mr Grey.”

“Sorry, sir?”

“You must have started out from somewhere. Where were you born?”

It was too awful. Feeling perfectly idiotic, George said, “Er … sort of … a bit outside … Winchester, sir. In a village, sir.”

The class laughed. Oh, the shame of it, when you were a brand-new officer cadet, destined to command!

Prynne seemed to soften slightly. “It’s not a very
precise
position, is it, Mr Grey? But the good navigator has to make the most of whatever gen he has to hand, and if you think that ‘er sort of a bit outside Winchester sir’ sounds pretty ropey, I think I can promise you that you’ll meet worse at sea. So, for Mr Grey’s known point of departure, we’re stuck with sort of a bit outside Winchester. Mr Ives, I wonder if you’d care to do a spot of inspired guesswork, if it’s not too early in the morning for you?”

“No, sir. Yes, sir.”

“The co-ordinates of Winchester, if you please. Do you know it? Very imposing cathedral there. A little north and west of Portsmouth.”

“Yes, sir. I’m not sure, sir. About, oh, 51 north and 1 degree west, sir?”

“Yes, that’ll do. Though I rather think you’ve managed to put poor old Winchester somewhere in Sussex, which it wouldn’t like at all. Never mind.” He chalked up the letters KPD on the blackboard and wrote 51.00°N 1.00° W beside them. “Now we have the vexed question of Mr Grey’s intended destination. He has, we must assume, been sailing from Winchester in a brave if, as we now know, forlorn attempt to be punctual for his Navigation class here in Pwllheli. Can anyone give me the co-ordinates, in exact figures this time, of Pwllheli? Yes, Mr Owen.”

“52 degrees, 54 minutes north, 4 degrees 25 minutes west, sir.”

“Good. I do wish you wouldn’t look so confounded with wonder at Mr Owen’s genius, Mr Usherwood. We did go through all this last Tuesday.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now all we need is the course steered. Erratic, one might say. But let’s give Mr Grey the benefit of the doubt and take it that he consulted his charts and plotted a direct line from the original seat of King Arthur’s Round Table to Gimlet Rock. Any volunteers? Mr Farmer has the look of a man born with a compass rose in his head. Yes.”

“Three one five, sir.”

“Winchester to Pwllheli … three … one … five.” The chalk squealed on the board. “Now we have to face up to the matter of Mr Grey’s
speed
. We’re clearly not dealing with one of the fastest ships of the line.” He was whiffling again. George, looking up cautiously, saw that the curious noise made by the Commander to show he was happy was actually produced by loosening his false teeth and blowing through them. Prynne was now jigging his snappers up and down with the point of his tongue. The sight made George feel fractionally better about being ragged by the old man.

“Known point of departure. Course steered. Speed. Mmm. I don’t like the look of that speed at all. The duration of passage so far, from a bit outside Winchester to a bit outside Pwllheli, seems to have been somewhere in the region of eighteen years. Yes, Mr Grey?”

“And seven months, sir,” George said, determined to poker-face it out.

“And seven months.” Commander Prynne addressed himself in marvelling silence to the gollywogs on the walls, the squad of drilling cadets beyond the window, the flies that were buzzing against the ceiling and, finally, the navigation class. He whiffled contentedly for several seconds and said, “What, ah—kept you, Mr Grey?”

“I slept through the—”

But Prynne wasn’t going to be cheated of his endgame. “Ah. Foul tidal streams all the way, no doubt. Years spent becalmed in fog, hundreds of miles lost in leeway. How long, Mr Grey, I wonder, did you have to stand hove-to in storm conditions? Eighteen years and seven months. Hmm. Gentlemen, this is an occasion worth hoisting all our flags for. Here at last is Mr Grey, one of His Majesty’s bravest and most battered little corvettes, struggling into safe harbour under jury rig. (I rather think, Mr Grey, that if you try reaching up behind your starboard ear, you’ll find some spindrift there. Is it spindrift? Or just shaving soap?)”

George wasn’t late for Nav. class again. At the end of the course he passed out top in Navigation; streets ahead of
Carver, who came second.

Calliope
swayed a little on the invisible swell—just enough to remind George that he was afloat. The last grey shoulder of cliff had gone and the whole world was water now, with George its hub. He carried the circular horizon with him as he inched eastwards along his magnetic track at five and a quarter knots. The tide, such as it was, was with him too: the Channel, slowly filling up with green Atlantic water, was a sluggish river, its current easing the boat over the ground away from Cornwall to Plymouth and beyond. To his Dead Reckoning position, George added a mile and a half for the fair tide. How was it that old Prynne explained the term? “The ancients,” the Commander said, “always called an uncharted sea a ‘dead’ sea. Dead Reckoning is how you feel your way through an unknown world. It is exactly the same method that a blind man uses to make his way across a room. He counts his steps.” To prove the point, Ives had been blindfolded and despatched on a tricky voyage across the sandpit and the putting green to Admin, where he collided with Lieutenant Wates and sank.

George, following the drill, reported his course and position to Falmouth Coastguard over the radio telephone. “Destination not yet known,” he said. “I am a white, ketch-rigged trawler yacht. One person on board. Over.”

“Will you spell your vessel’s name please. Over.”

George said: “I spell: Charlie Alpha Lima Lima India Oscar Papa Echo. Over.” It was nice to find the jargon coming back pat on cue, like being able to speak Portuguese again.

“Thank you,
Calliope
. Have a pleasant voyage. Out, and listening on 16.”

George left the radio switched on, for company. He wasn’t alone: beyond the rim of haze, the Channel was full of ships. He listened to their captains calling.

“Par Pilots, Par Pilots, this is
Vivacity, Vivacity, Vivacity
. Over.”

No answer.
Vivacity
sounded fretful and down in the mouth as her captain repeated his appeal for his lost pilot. Far away on the starboard bow there was—not so much a ship as
the shadow of a ship, suspended high in the sky. George saw her masts and deckworks faintly printed, like an over-exposed photo, on the air. Christ, but she wasn’t so far away at all! A moment later her wash came rolling in out of the haze.
Calliope
tipped and lurched. George heard a doggish scuffle going on down below. His books must be falling about over the saloon floor. When he looked for the ship again, she was gone.

“Benevolence, Benevolence, Benevolence
. This is
Fidelity, Fidelity
. Do you read, please? Over …”

Lulled by the voices on the VHF, by the even rumble of the diesel and by the cradle motion of the water, George felt himself drifting off track. He checked the compass card as it swayed against the lubberline, but it was steady: 090, 092, 094, 093. Right on course. The autopilot was ticking as smoothly as a clock, and the spokes of the wheel shifted, a fraction of an inch at a time, back and forth, back and forth, as the boat felt for its heading. The merchant navy chaps all called the autopilot Lazy Mike: with Lazy Mike standing his watch at the wheel, George was free to get on with the serious business of navigation.

Known Point of Departure
… A guillemot dived to port, making a clean hole in the water. George patted his pockets, searching for pipe and tobacco. The sea ahead was as uniform as the silvering on a mirror: the horizon swivelled round its edge as if the boat was turning in slow circles, while the compass stayed on 093, wedged there, apparently, by a piece of grit in the works. George wasn’t fooled by this old dodge. He sucked on his empty pipe and willed the horizon to stop moving. It steadied for a moment, like the compass card, and began to spin the other way. Dizzied, George sat at the chart table: with a pair of dividers he measured off six nautical miles and applied them to his speculative pencil line over the wreck-strewn sea floor.

Paddington Station
. With Alex Maitland. Yes. January of ’44. The sea did funny things to one’s subconscious: it seemed as if the bright haze ahead was lifting, to disclose something
that he thought he’d left far astern. Filling his pipe, watching out for flotsam, he headed for this unexpected seamark.

It was the sense of letdown he felt first. He hadn’t been to London since he was a child. He’d hoped for some dramatic pandemonium—searchlights, sirens, sandbags. But there was nothing like that. The city looked insomniac and dingy. No-one bothered even to carry his gasmask any more. On the cab ride to Alex’s house in Earls Court they saw bombsites already looking like ruins from some other, ancient war, fading behind a tangle of loosestrife and nettle. The people on the streets were pallid, fat and spotty, as if they’d spent the last few years doing nothing but guzzle porridge. In their rationbook clothes they looked turned out on the cheap, like so many pieces of utility furniture.

Alex said: “Don’t you love London’s dear old ugly mug?”

George didn’t, but said yes, he did, because he was still in awe of Alex, who’d been to Harrow and smoked Russian cigarettes through a holder. He was also rather hoping to fall in love with Alex’s sister, not yet met. It was Melissa (he’d already fallen in love with her name) who’d asked Alex to bring a friend to Mrs Holland’s dance.

“Lissa says there isn’t a man left in London. I think she’s expecting me to bring the entire Navy.”

George feared for his church hall quickstep, but phoned his father to say that his leave had been cancelled. In the cabin he shared with Alex on the corvette
Larkspur
he practised the slow-slow-quick-quick-slow routine, holding a cushion to his chest. The cushion was Melissa, whose picture was conveniently pinned up over Alex’s bunk between Mae West and Norma Shearer.

He didn’t fall in love with Melissa. Neither Alex nor her photo had revealed that she was built like a beanpole and talked non-stop through her nose. Apparently she’d been going around with a bunch of greyjobs, and her word of the moment was “wizard”. It was wizard that George had been able to show up, simply wizard; Alex was looking absolutely wizard, and the news of his impending second stripe and
transfer to destroyers was too wizard for words. George, aghast at the thought of the way he’d held Melissa cheek to cheek, squarely blamed Melissa for leading him up the garden path.

The dance, at someone’s house in South Kensington, was a revelation. The blackout curtains, which were up on all the windows, weren’t there to hide the place from attack by the Germans. It was English eyes that these people must have been afraid of—the envious, prying eyes of the men and women out on the street. For, as you passed through the hallway with its marble pillars, you entered a world where there were no shortages, no rationing, no war … just pots and pots of gaiety and money. A Negro in a red tuxedo was conducting a jazz band. There was a man with champagne in an ice bucket. (Whoever managed to get champagne—or ice—in 1944? And how?)