Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

George closed his eyes. From across the water he could hear the jerky chatter of an outboard motor. Shouting boys were pulling the tuna boats in out of the surf. Women were carrying away armfuls of tarnished silver skipjack, and yellow dogs were barking hopefully on the fringe of things. George’s mouth sagged open. There was something he’d forgotten to tell Raymond Luis, but he couldn’t remember what it was … something about the discharge gauge on Number 2 Dock … He grunted loudly three times, and began to snore. Waking, an hour later, to the sway of the boat and the gobbling noise of water in the bilges, he opened one cautious eye on the lamplit saloon, and saw that it was all right — he was home.

Diana Pym was a black silhouette against the sun. In outline she was comically topheavy: an obese and shaggy sheepskin coat supported by a starved pair of ankles and calves.

George was down on his knees on the deck scraping at the caulked planking with a block of holystone.

“That looks like a nice thing to be doing,” she said, talking out of her private patch of darkness. There was something actressy in her voice, fogged and roughened with chainsmoking as it was. Once upon a time it had been sent to school to learn things like projection and breath control.

“Do come down, if you can manage the ladder,” George said.

“May I really? I’d like that-”

There were only five rungs of the ladder to negotiate, but Diana Pym faced them like a mountaineer on a precipice. George reached out to help her step over the rail; when she gripped his hand he felt the tense bony nervousness of her, like a fizzle of static.

“Oh. Thank you. I’m not so hot at heights.” She stared back at the dripping weed on the quay wall. When she moved out of the wall’s shadow into the sun, she looked tired. Daylight wasn’t kind to her. At first glance her face was that of a girl, then the sun picked out the skin around her eyes, like the crazed varnish of an old picture.

“In five years of living here, I’ve never actually been on a boat before.” Her gaze was loose and unfocused as she looked about her, smiling vaguely at everything she saw. To the two anchors lashed down on the foredeck, she gave a little knowing nod. “What do you call this? I mean, is it a yacht, or a schooner, or what?”

“She’s a ketch,” George said. He pulled aside a tangle of dirty rope to clear a gangway for her.

“Oh, I’m sorry. She , of course.” She laughed. “And that brick there … is that what they call a holystone?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I thought it must be. You looked just like a Muslim on a prayer mat.”

“Facing east, too,” George said. “Though more towards Moscow than Mecca.”

“Is that the way you incline?”

“To Moscow? Good Heavens, no.”

Diana Pym looked disappointed. She walked gingerly on the deck, clinging to the rail, as if the boat might at any moment choose to tip her out into the harbour. At the entrance to the wheelhouse she said abruptly: “You’re growing a beard—”

George touched the bristles on his chin: he’d forgotten about them. “No, not exactly. I suppose I’m just waiting to see if one turns up.”

She stared at his face for a moment with a frankness that he found unsettling. “It’ll suit you.”

“The last time I tried to grow a beard, it wasn’t a success. I was nineteen and in the Navy. You had to get permission from the captain to stop shaving, then after thirty days you had to take your beard to him for an inspection. I was inordinately proud of mine. I thought it added no end of authority to my face. Made me look born to command. That … wasn’t what the captain thought, though. At the end of thirty days, he took one look at it and ordered the thing off.”

“How long has this one been going?”

“Oh … four days, I think. No, five.”

“You’ll pass.”

“You think?”

“It’s such a lovely colour. Pure silver.”

George laughed; an embarrassed honk that scared the gulls on the quay wall. He showed Diana Pym through the wheel-house, down the steps and into the shadowy saloon. He lit the gas under the kettle and covertly fingered his raw bristles.

He’d hung a trailing fern in a raffia basket from a beam on the coachroof, and Diana Pym stood on the far side of the greenery. The saloon was full of the damp fleecy smell of her coat, and this stranger’s smell made the saloon itself seem suddenly strange. She was peering at his books and pictures, at the ticking barograph, at the overpolished lamps, and with each quick movement of her head, George saw that he’d created something reprehensible — something too neat to be real. It was fussy and self-regarding. He felt that he’d been caught out playing with a dolls’ house.

“I see,” she said. “It’s an ark.”

He stared at her. Was there mockery there?

“What’s it made from?”

“Oh … oak … larch … mahogany … teak …”

“No gopher wood?”

“Not a splinter.”

“Noah would have envied you.”

He made coffee in the tall pewter pot that he’d collected in Aden.

“Who is this?”

George pretended not to know what she was talking about, and carefully inspected the picture on the bulkhead. “Ah … a friend. In Montedor, … in fact.”

“And you miss her.”

He looked at her for a moment. In the half dark, she was a girl with a wistful voice on an old black and white television screen. “Yes. I do, rather.”

“She looks special.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just the way she’s looking into the camera. It’s obvious that you were taking the picture …”

“Is it?” He’d never realized that Vera wore such a giveaway expression in that photograph. It was two years old. They’d been on the beach at Sào Filipe. Teddy, who’d been snorkelling, was wearing a pair of red rubber flippers. He had picked up George’s camera and snapped Vera sitting on a rock.

“What’s her name?”

“Oh … ah, Vera …” said George distantly, pouring coffee into mugs in the galley.

A long muscle of wash from a coaster going out on the tide made the boat roll. There was a gasping sound from the fenders as they were squashed against the quay. Diana Pym clung to the saloon table, her knuckles showing white.

“It’s disorienting, isn’t it — being on a boat? It feels as if you might suddenly find the sky right under your feet.”

“Yes.” George put the mugs cautiously down on the tabletop. The green fern was swaying, the coffee slopped from rim to rim, and the four weak sunbeams from the portholes went raking up and down the mahogany walls. “I think that’s what I like best about it: I like the way it makes one moment seem quite different from the next—”

“And one day, you’ll just sail off?”

“In a while. When the weather’s right. When I’ve learned to get the hang of her.”

“Gosh.” She lit a cigarette. “Where will you go?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind. It doesn’t do to make too many plans when you take to a boat; they never work out, anyway. The best thing is just to wait and see where the weather and the tides allow you to go. Then you decide that that’s exactly where you had every intention of going in the first place.”

“Will it be far? I mean, could you go to Africa in this, or sail the Atlantic?”

“Oh, one could. I shan’t. England’s quite foreign enough for me, at present.”

Behind the coils of pale smoke and the moving fronds of fern, Diana Pym’s face dissolved, reappeared, dissolved again. “Does it ever stay still?”

“No, there’s always a sort of spongy feeling to it — you always know you’re afloat.”