Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

All through the morning, Penhaligon’s Taxi (“Funerals and Weddings Fully Catered For”) kept up a shuttle service in the drizzle between Thalassa and the quay. The tea chests emptied and the boat settled on its waterline as George loaded her with his cargo of precious junk. The tide was on the ebb, and by lunchtime he was standing on the edge of the dripping quay wall, lowering stuff down to the deck in Vera’s bag at the end of a rope. Herring gulls honked and wheezed over his head. He scrambled down the slippery ladder, bruising his shins, and carried another armful of books and trinkets into the dry of the cabin.

Working in the rain, he brought his life aboard; though, for a man as tall and loosely constructed as George, his life was rather on the small side. Piled up in tidy heaps in the saloon, it was, as lives went, a modest affair. There seemed to be hardly more of it than when he’d first packed up his things in a trunk and sent them Passenger Luggage in Advance to Pwllheli.

He spread the striped Wolof rug on the saloon floor and glued his pipe rack (a present from Vera two birthdays ago) to the bulkhead. It was a novelty to be using glue at all: in George’s experience, things always had to be readily movable. The safest way to live was to assume that your marching orders would arrive tomorrow. If they didn’t, that was your good luck; and you certainly didn’t tempt fate by sticking things to your walls with glue. Pleased by the way the pipe rack looked, George hesitated over a particular treasure — a framed watercolour sketch by Van Guylen of ships at anchor in Mindelo harbour in 1846—and stuck that fast, too.

He had never had a proper place of his own before. He’d always been a lodger in other people’s houses and had picked up the lodger’s habit of passing through without leaving tracks. He’d been born in a rectory that belonged to the Church and gone on to Navy quarters and Company apartments; and he left each billet exactly as he’d found it. There was no wallpaper so virulent that George couldn’t live with it: in Dar-es-Salaam he’d slept for two years in a bedroom decorated with black feet on a forsythia-yellow ground, though it had once caused a girl called Dorothy to wake him with a screaming nightmare. In Bom Porto, the sheets on his bed were marked “Shepherd’s Hotel, Cairo”, the knives and forks belonged to the French railways, the threadbare grey towels in the bathroom to St Joseph’s Mission School. George felt no more responsible for these things than he did for the weather.

Calliope was different. Last week, when he’d received from Harwich the cracked and elderly document that registered her as a British Ship, with George as her Master and sole owner of all her 64 shares, he found that she’d been built in 1924, the same year as him. That seemed to fit nicely — it confirmed the odd kinship he’d felt with the boat when he’d first seen her drifting out from the quay. She had been a trawler then, called Lizzie V. She had been rechristened a muse in 1958, when she’d retired and been converted to a yacht. The panelled saloon had been her fish hold; and where she’d once been stacked with crans of herring, George now snugged down his shelf of Kipling. The swastikas on the spines of their claret bindings had shed most of their gold leaf: Life’s Handicap was on its last legs, Kim’s pages had grown fat and soggy with rereading. He roped the books tight with shock-cord, then made them rock solid by wedging Palgrave’s Golden Treasury between Many Inventions and Barrack Room Ballads .

It was a bit late in the day to start building one’s first real nest. In Bom Porto, George had watched other men come out in their twenties and go home to mortgages in England in their thirties, their migratory patterns as regular as those of swallows. To begin with, there had been a little British community of young men in Montedor. Until 1964, there’d been a consulate. By the ’70s, though, there was hardly anyone left. Carmody went in ’71; Palmer and Lytton in ’75. Humphreys stayed on through Independence until 1979. Then there was just George. It was as if he lacked the internal compass, or radar, or whatever it was that told birds to take off for home at the right season. He lodged where he was, waiting for orders that had taken a quarter of a century to arrive. Every year, the young men grew a shade younger. They stopped calling him “George” and started calling him “Mr Grey”. They showed him photographs of the houses they were going to buy at home — they were all of the same house, an ugly, half-prefabricated building made out of formica and eggboxes, on a “private estate” in a suburb of a Midland city. He knew the names of the girls they were planning to marry — the Alisons, Sues and Janices, with their jobs as nurses and secretaries. “Funny-you not marrying,” they said. “Oh,” George said, “I was married once,” and left it at that. When he saw the young men off, first on the boat, later at the new airport, he felt a melancholy wriggle of envy for them. They were so sure of what they wanted, and of what they deserved; and they had the mysterious knack of seeming to want only what they deserved; where he came unstuck was that he hadn’t deserved the things he wanted. Like Angela, he thought, shaking out an old brown jacket of Donegal tweed and fitting it into the port-side hanging locker.

He wound up the small barograph which used to stand in his office at the bunkering station and glued its wooden base to the shelf. A length of shock-cord, fastened to the wall with screw-eyes, made a good waistband in which to hold the battered olive oil tin full of blunt coloured pencils. There was no room at sea for clutter and loose ends. Everything had to be strapped in its due place and battened down, if you didn’t want the first big wave to turn your life into an Irish stew. George had had enough already in the way of breakages: aboard Calliope , he meant to keep things shipshape and Bristol fashion.

A scallop boat manoeuvered alongside. Its girdle of motor tyres squeezed close. Calliope slopped heavily about in its wash as the boat went astern, its screw making the water round it boil. There were voices, booted footsteps over George’s head, the sound of a heavy rope being dragged across his roof to the quay.

Hunkered down in secret, he lit the charcoal stove and paraffin lamps, and watched the saloon fill with dodging shadows, as abrupt and quick as mice. Nothing was still. The timbers of the boat flexed and creaked. The lamps tipped in their gimbals. The floor felt spongy and provisional, as if it might dissolve away from under his feet. The sensation of floating was unnervingly keen and intimate: it was like the childhood dreams in which George had stepped off a top stair and found himself weightless as an angel. Drifting gently down the deep stairwell, occasionally reaching out a toe to touch ground, he’d known that his power was unique. No-one else must learn that he could fly. It seemed that his dreams hadn’t changed much over the last five decades; they had just grown more grandiose. Now he was planning to step off the edge of England and float free.

The barograph ticked on the shelf. A brick of charcoal hissed and settled in the stove. The air was rich, laden with the good smells of wax, oil, tobacco and old wood. Moving carefully, taking pleasure in each sensation as it came, George stooped under the beams to read the barograph. The inked line on the drum was at 1023 millibars and rising steadily. Soon the wind would die and the sky clear. He stretched himself on the plum-coloured leather of the settee berth and watched the sauntering lamplights. As the boat stirred in the water, the lights crossed and tangled. They chased each other along a row of books, rested for a moment on a framed photo of Vera at the beach, and dived to the rough and vivid weave of the rug on the floor.