Foreign Land (44 page)

“No sun today. There’s a strike on.”

“Give us a mirror and a star, then.”

George opened his eyes again. The headlines of the day’s papers were arranged on the counter like a crossword. He read IAN TELLS ARTHUR: GET STUFFED and NO DIVORCE FOR DEIRDRE AND KEN. He closed his eyes and let the voices in the shop wash over him.

“Awlid haretna, al-liss wal kilab.”

“Ne bith him to hearpan hyge.”

“Ik kan alleen nog regels schrijva.”

“Ta ta, dear.”

“Ne to hringthege, ne to wife wyn.”

“Niebo i pieklo!”

“Ne to worulde hyht. Ta ta, josy.”

“Ta ta.
Yuspliz?”

“Oh … sorry,” George said. “I wonder,” he spoke with care, mouthing his words, “if you have such a thing as a pint of milk?”

He bought milk, eggs and a tin of steak and kidney pudding. He paid with the fifty-pound note, which the woman accepted with a sigh and a glare. “I’m afraid I’ve nothing smaller.” The woman stood at the till, sniffing with annoyance and making a stolid pantomime of the business of counting out his change. Speaking to someone behind him, she tipped her head in George’s direction. “The season’s starting early this year, it looks like. There you are,
Monsewer!”
she shouted at George; “Forty-eight pounds and sixty-two pee! And
Bon-Jewer
to you!”

“I’m not deaf, you know,” George said, stuffing the soggy tangle of notes into his trouser pocket. As he let himself out of the shop he heard the word “Tourists!”—a term of abuse ripe enough to comprehend a man like him in his entirety.

When he climbed down the ladder to the dinghy, holding his bag of things between his teeth, he found Sheila waiting for him. Lost inside the padded bulk of her gorse yellow Junior Crewsaver, she looked famished and skinny, an Oxfam child. Her face was as brown as an Arab’s.

Sheila sat up on the stern of the boat, trailing her fingers in the water as George rowed away from the wall. He fussed over her. “Do sit more in, darling. Yes, like that. And keep a hold on the rope there. We don’t want you going overboard.”

“I can swim,” Sheila said. “I can swim eighteen strokes.”

“Yes, darling, but the water’s very cold here at this time of year. It’s not warm enough for swimming.”

“I can swim further than Tory Wilshawe.”

They drifted out on to the waxy surface of the open river.

The tide was on the turn now, and the going was easy. George stopped the dinghy so that Sheila could exchange pleasantries with a pair of swans. He paddled her close under the side of the sail training ship, and they watched the children there, swarming high up in the yards, while a man with a megaphone jollied them along from down on deck. Sheila squinched up her eyes and made a face. “They’ll fall,” she said.

“They’ve all got harnesses on. They’re safer than they look.”

Squiring her on the water, the proprietor of all she saw, George gave Sheila the whole of Dartmouth as an enormous present: the Naval College on the hill, the car ferry trundling across the river on its chains, the big crabber manoeuvring in midstream, the yachts and rainbow sailboards, the old cream and chocolate steam train whoop-whooping out of the woods on the Kingswear shore.

Sheila said: “I saw a boy fall off that ship. He was drowned.”

“No he wasn’t. He just went on swimming under the water and turned into a sealion.”

“You’re so silly, Daddy. You’re too silly for words!”

“Don’t sit up on the edge like that, darling—you’ll fall in.”

“I’ll turn into a sealion.”

“Oh, no, you won’t—”

“Oh, yes, I will!”

Sheila kept him company until he was alongside
Calliope
. He climbed aboard lightly, swinging himself over the rail with a young man’s easy stride, and hauled the dinghy in after him. Down below, waiting for his breakfast coffee to reheat on the stove, George found himself explaining that there wasn’t really enough wind to sail by, but that the barometer looked steady and, once in Lyme Bay, the tides would be slack and they should make Lyme itself before it got dark.

“What do you think?”

“You’re the big enchilada, baby.” Teddy said, loosely sprawled on the starboard settee berth sucking Sun Top through a straw. He raised himself on one elbow and looked
incuriously at Dartmouth through a porthole. “What is this joint, anyway?”

“You’d hate it,” George said.

“Looks like too much of a marshmallow town for me.”

“That’s the trouble. They’re all marshmallow towns round here.”

“Well, if you’ve got the ants, let’s burn rubber.” He sank back on the cushions and noisily sucked at the last of his drink.

By eleven o’clock George had winched the anchor up and was under way, with
Calliope
ploughing at half speed ahead through a misty drizzle so fine that one couldn’t tell it was raining except for the softened edges of the castles and the woodlands at the mouth of the estuary. The velvety water ahead gradually faded in colour until it was all of a piece with the mother-of-pearl sky.

He set a southwesterly course on the autopilot to skirt Castle Ledge and the jagged, gullshitty island of Mew Stone, and whistled a few bars of “Tiger Rag”, thinking it might help to raise a breeze. But the tell-tale ribbons on the shrouds didn’t stir, and the only movement of the sea was a flaccid bulge of swell left over from yesterday.

It took half an hour to lose the land astern. As soon as it was safely out of sight, George eased the boat round northwards on a course of 041°. Five miles off Berry Head, according to his dead reckoning, the drizzle petered out and the ribbons on the shrouds began to ripple in an idle, offhand sort of way. In the cockpit, he sucked on his forefinger and raised it high to test the air. There wasn’t a wind, exactly; more an atmospheric restlessness, a faint snuffling from somewhere away to the south-east. When he hoisted the sails, they hung in creases from the masts. He stopped the engine and whistled “The Miller of Dee”.

Calliope
seemed not to be moving at all, but the rudder was leaving a trickling eddy of water behind it; and when George flipped a matchbox over the bow and paced it down the deck as it bobbed along the boat’s side, he counted eleven seconds before it passed the stern. About one knot, he reckoned,
thinking of the
Queen Adelaide
and the passage to Aden.

The Dunnetts had left a mackerel line in the tool locker, a lurid contraption of lead weights and bright feathers which George lowered over the side: at least he could frighten the fish if he couldn’t catch them. He sat in the cockpit, tweaking the line with his fingers and getting no bites.

“Come on, fish—” He could feel the deep thrum of the weights in the water like an electrical current. “Send me a signal and state your position.”

“Why are you talking to the fish, Daddy?”

“Because there’s nothing fish like more than a little polite conversation. The little fishes of the sea, They sent an answer back to me. The little fishes’ answer was, We cannot do it, Sir, because-”

“They didn’t.”

“Yes they did, honour bright. And there was a man once who used to charm the fish by playing his flute to them on a pond.”

He let Sheila hold the line. She gripped it tightly, showing the whites of her knuckles as if she expected imminent contact with a shark. She said “Hello, fish!” in an experimental voice and giggled.

“That’s the way. You know, the biggest treat for a fish, what he likes best in all the world, is to hear the seven times table spoken very clearly with no urns and ers.”

The boat flopped about in the swell. Water gurgled in the tanks; the booms of the sails creaked and slammed. A man could live for a long time like this, out of the way of things, offshore, beyond the reach of the snags and troubles of the land. You wouldn’t need much—enough wind to keep you out of the doldrums, a sextant, a supply of fish hooks, a good clock …

“Seven fours are twenty-eight, seven fives are thirty-five,” Sheila sang out in her pipsqueak voice.

George’s crooked smile disclosed a single tooth, stained yellow with tobacco. He was Noah, seeing the last mountain-top go under, with the ark riding clear on the flood. There was
a lot to be said for the idea of carrying the world away in a gopherwood shell. George leaned back in the cockpit and pulled the long brim of his cap over his eyes. (It had shed two more letters.)

“Seven sevens are forty-nine, seven eights are fifty-six—”

He scratched at an itch in his beard, thinking of his crew, his family. Diana was there, and Sheila, of course. Teddy and Vera were guests; and for the first time George found himself not minding that there were jokes between those two that he missed. At dinner in the saloon, they crowded round the little table, all talking at once, as families did. He looked from lamplit face to lamplit face. He topped up Teddy’s glass and caught Diana’s private smile. They were safe with him, all of them. He plotted their course, kept the sails trimmed and the log up to date. He was their pilot, shepherd, paterfamilias. Though quite how the sleeping arrangements worked out, George wasn’t sure.

“Seven elevens are seventy—I’ve got one! I’ve got one! Look, Daddy, I’ve got one!”

And she had. The fish showed in the water as a scoop of silver and came tumbling over the gunwale—a lightning bolt on the end of a piece of string. It thrashed on the duckboards, shedding lilac scales like coins. George killed it quickly with a winch handle. In seconds, the expression of astonished accusation in its eye began to fade. He watched as its scales dulled and its skin wrinkled. It was a sorry sort of fish, out of condition, its head far too big for its body.

Cleaning it in a bucket of seawater was an act of penance. He cut off its head and pulled out its intestines with his fingers. Sheila said “Yuck” and squeezed her eyes tight shut when he chucked the bloody water over the side.

There was nothing in sight—no boats, no land. George went below and grilled the mackerel for his lunch. He couldn’t finish it: its too-white flesh tasted vaguely of soap flakes. Later, he hid the fishing line in the back of the tool locker. He didn’t want to kill any more things. That wasn’t what an ark was for.

At Lyme Regis
Calliope
lay against the breakwater just inside the harbour entrance, where she dried out at low tide. Beached, out of her element, she looked enormous, more ship than boat. George stood underneath her, gumbooted, scrubbing the slime and barnacles off her great ribbed belly with a broom. Fiddler crabs scuttled between his feet. Lulled by the rhythmical scratch of the brush on the wood, he found himself laughing aloud because all he could think of was Lady Standing’s Rejuvenating Cream For Tired Faces And Hands.

The mizzen sheet was looking badly frayed around the running blocks where it was fastened to the boom. George walked into the town to replace it, taking the beach route where shallow ledges of grey rock shelved down into the sea. He jumped from ledge to ledge, breathing Vera’s way, and arrived at a crevasse too wide to jump, where a tongue of sea ran in, making a deep anemone pool. The surface of the rock on which he stood was lightly scrolled with a spiral pattern as big as a dinner plate.

His father tapped it with the handle of his prawn net.

“Ammonite,” George said.

“Period?”

“Jurassic.”

“After the Jura mountains. In France, old boy,” his father said. George watched his mother, walking on ahead. Though there was no wind, she was pushing at her skirt to stop it blowing up above her knees.

In Lyme he found a yacht chandler’s called Midships. He stood browsing among the cardboard drums of rope, looking for one of the right thickness to fit the block on the boom.

“Yes. Can I help you?” He was a fat man in a guernsey with
Midships
embroidered in red across the chest. George spotted him immediately.

“Marsland!”

“Yes—”

Poor Marsland. He’d lost all his hair since his Pwllheli days and his gums had shrunk away from his teeth. On the profit side, he had gained a vast drinker’s gut and a pair of gold-rimmed half-moon specs. Taken all round, Marsland showed a pretty disastrous net loss.

“Grey,” George said. “Remember? Pwllheli. We were on the same course.”

“Good heavens.
Were
we?” He peered at George, first over the tops of his lenses and then through the bottoms. He didn’t seem very pleased with what he saw.

“I didn’t have the beard then,” George said, doing his best to help.

“A lot of chaps on the course …” Marsland seemed to be taking a particular interest in George’s hair, as if he suspected George of concealing his own baldness under a wig. “No, you don’t stand out at all in my mind, I’m afraid.”

Offended, George said, “I knew who you were as soon as I saw you.”

“Yes,” Marsland said suspiciously.
“Pwllheli.”
He was, George noticed, trying to hold his stomach in. He pointed to his chest. “You see I’ve still kept the old handle.”

“Sorry?”

“Midships. You know. If you were on the course. You all used to call me ‘Midships’ … and it sort of … stuck. Midships Marsland. I think it all actually started with my steering the longboat … couldn’t keep it straight … some silly thing …”