Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

HOLSUM — AMERCA’S #1B EAD

Comfortably hatted, with the peak pulled down low over his eyes, George began to unpack. His most ordinary things had taken on a peculiar patina in the course of their ocean passage to Cornwall. He gazed wonderingly at the cracked ivory back of his old hairbrush. He found his squash racket stuffed down the side of the chest. He bounced the strings against his left palm and wallopped a volley in a low curve over the top of the dead TV screen. He heard, just beside him, the slap and squeak of Teddy’s plimsolls as the ball zapped back off the wall from half the world away.

The narrow margin of water between Calliope and the quay was more of a step than a jump; but once aboard the ketch George felt that he was a long way out. The moment he unlocked the door of the wheelhouse he turned into a trespasser. He went through the boat on tiptoe and was shy of touching things. When the cabin floor shifted very slightly underfoot, he grabbed at the rope on the coachroof — dizzied not so much by the motion of the water as by the intimacy on which he had intruded.

There was something indecent and forlorn about the boat. Stepping inside it was like reading another man’s love letter. Every time he opened a locker or looked at a fitting, George saw Roy Dunnett making one more craven appeal to his wife.

The poor booby. Everything was new: new radio, new autopilot, new echo sounder, new brass binnacle compass. An unopened parcel from a yacht chandlers’ in Lymington turned out to contain a fringed blue deck awning; in a cardboard box there were courtesy flags for France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, each one sheathed in tissue paper. The fridge in the galley had never been used. On top of it was a patent gadget with gimbals for keeping cocktails steady in high seas.

Yet the boat had been nowhere. The leatherbound ship’s log in the wheelhouse didn’t have a single entry in it. There was one chart in the drawer under the chart table. It was of the English Channel from Falmouth to Plymouth, and was mint except for a pencil line connecting St Cadix to the Gribbin Head and the Fowey estuary twelve miles away, with the figure “069 (Magnetic)” written neatly above the line. This cautious little voyage must have been just as speculative a projection as the Greek flag or the South Biscay Pilot on a bookshelf in the saloon.

Rootling deeper in the bowels of the boat, George could smell Dunnett’s fear of the sea. He unearthed a manual called How to Survive in Your Liferaft , enough flares to light the sky from horizon to horizon, five different brands of pills for travel sickness, a lot of tubes of glue.

It was rum. Cynthia Dunnett, the inamorata for whom this extravagant fantasy had been furnished (on an RAF pension?), went about in hand-me-downs and smelled of cabbage. Roy Dunnett must have imagined her swanning round the Cyclades with a martini in her hand — just as he’d imagined himself clinging to the wreckage, lungs full of salt water, shouting in the dark.

George could feel the man, unpleasantly close at hand. Calliope had been Dunnett’s last bid for a new start. Now that he owned Dunnett’s boat, was he saddled with Dunnett’s hopeless fantasies too? More to the point, was it something dim and Dunnettlike in himself that had drawn him to the quay in the first place to moon over this tubby dreamboat?

He hadn’t bargained on finding a sitting tenant aboard. Trying to evict him, George screwed open the portholes to freshen the trapped air of the saloon. He pushed up the glass hatch over the forecabin and carried out the Dunnett-mattresses and Dunnett-cushions on to the deck. He made a pile of Dunnett-things, beginning with the framed colour photo of Cynthia Dunnett in yellow Wellington boots; the twin braided yachting caps, made by Locks the hatters and stamped “CD.” and “R.D.” in gold leaf on the hatbands; and the South Biscay Pilot , whose flyleaf was inscribed, “Darling — here’s hoping. From your own Roy. Xmas 1980”.

Well, George was hoping too. At the end of the day, he rang the wing commander.

“Don’t you bother, please, old boy—” Over the phone, the bronchial voice sounded like the chinking of dead leaves in a breeze. “Anything you don’t want, just pitch it over the side. You know how upset Cynthia would be to see it in the house—”

Since the day when George paid him in cash for the boat, there’d been a fraternal chumminess in Dunnett’s manner. George didn’t care for it; he felt he was being treated as a partner in crime.

“I expect it’s all a bit of a cabbage patch for you at present,” Dunnett said.

“Cabbage patch?” George was thinking of the smell of Persimmons.

“What we used to call a low-flying raid over enemy territory.” He giggled nervously and hung up.

George took the floorboards out of the boat and worked in the bilges, pulling out knots of oily filth with his hands. In the engine compartment under the wheelhouse, he found something unpleasant that looked as if it had probably been a dead rat. He wiped and pocketed a George V half-crown and an ear ring. He sluiced out the bilges with a borrowed hose and pumped them dry. He got down on his knees and sniffed under the joists. No trace of Dunnett.

After three days, his hands were raw, his palms were cracked, but George’s head was blessedly empty. Cleaning out the boat, he found he’d swabbed and scoured a lot of the grimier recesses in himself. He rubbed sweet-scented beeswax deep into the grain of the mahogany panels and polished the wood to a dark and glassy bloom. He liked to watch the film of Brasso first cloud, then dry to a dusty white crust on the tarnished metal. Gently, he washed off the caked carbon from the tulip glasses of the oil lamps in warm soapsuds. Small waves chuckled and gossipped companionably round the hull, and vagrant sunbeams from the portholes skedaddled up and down the saloon as the boat tipped on the wake of a passing coaster. George was lost to the world in his mellow wooden cave. Crouched on all fours with a fistful of dusters, he put his weight behind his polishing arm and whistled “Tiger Rag” through his teeth.

The hour after church on Sunday morning was a busy time at the Royal St Cadix Yacht Club. Roberts, the bar steward, was setting up a line of pink gins, shaking beads of angostura bitters from the glasses. George was talking to Rupert Walpole. At the end of the bar, old Freddie Corquordale was reading bits out loud from the Sunday Telegraph .

“Just a small sherry for me. Dry, please,” said Verity Caine to Denis Wright, whose round it was.

“Of course, the computer’s only as good as the stuff you feed into it. Rubbish in, rubbish out, as they say—” Rupert Walpole said to George.

To anyone who would listen, Freddie Corquordale said: “‘Des Hubble (26), a Camden social worker, told the court that in his view glue-sniffing was a consequence of government policy on youth unemployment.’ I think if I were Des Hubble (26) and that was a fair sample of my wit and wisdom, I’d be rather inclined to pipe down.”

Betty Castle and Mrs Downes both laughed politely. You had to humour Freddie Corquordale, especially on Sundays. It had been on a Sunday, at about this time last year, that Daphne had died of a kidney thing.

“What blazing rot!” Freddie said, and sipped happily at his whisky and splash.

George said, “What sort of annual tonnage are you handling?”