Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“They’re a very pretty colour,” she said politely.

He gazed at her, smiling, as if she’d said something surprising and original. “Yes,” he said. “They work by suction, you know — like an aerofoil. They generate lift …” Then his face clouded and he went back to his wheelhouse, where she watched him through the window, his big untidy head bent over his compasses and charts and rulers and whatnot.

Now he was back again, a towering jack-in-a-box. He was carrying a heavy, rubberclad pair of binoculars. “Have you ever seen your house from the sea?”

“Oh — I hadn’t noticed where we were.”

She took the binoculars and found the cottage, framed between cliffs of birdlimed granite. The curtains in the bedroom were carelessly half-drawn and the kitchen window was open. It looked as if she was still inside. Weird. She said, “God, it’s like being your own ghost, isn’t it?” The heron was fishing from the wet rocks below the drawing room. She imagined herself stepping out of the front door and the heron flapping off on stiff and creaky wings. She passed the binoculars back a shade more hurriedly than she had meant.

“How fast are we going?”

“Oh, not very fast. About five knots.”

“What is a knot?”

“It’s a measure of speed through the water. One nautical mile in an hour. On the old ships, they used to chuck out a block of wood from the stern and see how many feet of rope it would unwind in a given time from a revolving drum … a fishing-reel thing. The rope was marked off with knots, so they just had to count the knots on the rope to find out how fast they were going.” He was scanning the coast through his binoculars. “But that’s not our real speed. That’s just our speed through the sea. But the sea’s moving too. It’s travelling with us on this tide, out to the Atlantic. It’s making about three knots, here, so we’re moving over the ground at about eight. If I turned the boat round, our speed would drop to two knots.”

“I see.” Diana didn’t see at all, but what he was saying corresponded with her own sense that things were relative and slippery here at sea.

“Have you given up?”

“What?”

“Smoking,” he said.

“Oh.” She didn’t catch on immediately; she thought (was she really so jellyfish-transparent?) that he was talking about dope. “No. Sometimes I just forget to.”

“You ought to forget to more often,” he said in his new, sea captain’s voice. “Do you a world of good.” He went off to do something with a rope at the far end of the boat. He was, Diana heard with astonishment, singing. “Get that tiger,” George Grey sang, “Get that tiger … Get that old tiger rag!”

He was full of information this morning. When she’d arrived at the quay and he stowed away the things she’d brought for lunch in the tiny kitchen of the boat, he rattled on about his daughter’s baby — quite out of character with his reticence last night. It was expected on September 28th … Sheila had had a scan but didn’t want to know the sex of the child in advance … It was, thought Diana, v. odd . This time, she was the one who was embarrassed: since reading The Noblest Station , she had rather cooled on the lady. She’d found the book voguish and a bit pretentious — the sort of book that people wrote by copying bits out of other people’s books in libraries and reassembling them. It hadn’t spoken directly to her at all. George Grey, though, had talked as if her only interest was in his daughter. For the first time, he’d seemed just like everyone else that one met at people like the Walpoles’, dismally crowing over the doings of their children.

“Yes,” he’d said, his head and shoulders framed in the hatchway, “apparently Tom — her … chap — is the one who’s going to the ante-natal classes.”

“Oh, really?” was all she could say to that.

At noon, he came out of his wheelhouse carrying what Diana assumed to be a sextant. He sat on the cabin roof with the instrument clamped to his eye, as absorbed and solemn as if he was performing a religious office.

“Are we lost already?” she called, but he gave no sign of hearing. She could see the twisty pillars of white steam from the china clay works near St Austell, and Dodman Point like a portion of apple crumble in the haze.

He padded back to the wheelhouse, muttering numbers. She saw him behind the glass, poring intently over the chart table. She had always liked the priest’s air of self-containment as he got on with the business of the Mass up at the holy end, and in George Grey’s face there was the same kind of seminarian youthfulness. His tongue showed between his lips, and the expression of his mouth and eyes was unmasked as he turned the page of a book as fat as a family Bible.

A few minutes later, he was back. “I was about a mile out,” he said. “Not bad, after thirty-five years.”

A mile seemed rather a lot to Diana, but she said, “No. That must be reassuring. I suppose it’s like riding bicycles.” A huge and psychedelic jellyfish, gorged with blood, floated past the rail. “Are they Portuguese men-of-war?”

“Where?” He was looking in the wrong place, at the horizon.

“The jellyfish.”

“Oh … no, I don’t think so. They’re too small, aren’t they?”

“They look enormous to me.” She remembered Father McKinley, lonely in his white air-conditioned church, raising the Host into a beam of bland Pacific sun. Then, at lunch, they’d started with artichokes and hot butter. Father McKinley had stared at the spiky vegetable on his plate as if he’d never seen anything like it in his life. He watched Diana eating, and clumsily copied every movement that she made. Afterwards, having treated the finger bowl like a stoup, he said: “So clever of you, Diana. I just love asparagus.” That was the thing about priests: they knew everything and nothing all at once.

For lunch on the boat, she laid out an ascetic, priestly picnic in the cockpit: sticks of celery, two kinds of cheese, French bread, green olives. George Grey uncorked a bottle of wine that looked far too extravagant for the occasion. She sipped it and studied the label. Leoville-Barton 1971.

“It’s terribly good,” she said.

“It’s travelled too much,” he said, but didn’t explain. She watched the wake of the boat dwindling behind them, the ghostly bulk of the Cornish coast, a long way off now, too far to swim. George Grey’s face, shadowed by the peak of his cap, looked suddenly very unfamiliar. It was like the face of a man in a neighbouring car in a traffic jam, yet the littleness of the boat and the wide emptiness of the sea made him seem almost as close as if they were in the same bed. She munched noisily on a celery stick and hoped that he wasn’t thinking the same thing.

“It looks as if we’re going to get a bit of wind.” He was frowning at the water ahead. It was an even blue except for a broad, inky stripe along the horizon.

“Oh?”

“The barometer’s dropping. We’ll turn when the tide turns.” He leaned back in the cockpit, arms spreadeagled, his knobbly wrists sticking out a long way from the cuffs of his jumper. With an open palm he made himself the sponsor of the sea, the tall sky, the jellyfish, the easy lollop of the boat on the water. “Well?” When he smiled he showed receding gums and overlong teeth.

“It’s magic,” she said. “It’s so … laden.” She stopped herself from saying what she was really thinking, which was that it was just like smoking. As the hash took hold, you found yourself in free fall, out of control of your own sensations. Everything took you by surprise. As now. The diving guillemot past George Grey’s shoulder was astonishing: it looked like a bathtoy. Then there was the grubby Band Aid round the base of his thumb; wrinkled, pink, prosthetic. Every time she caught sight of something, it swelled to fill her field of vision. The air round the boat was hard and glittery: if you listened closely, you’d hear it tinkle. She heard it tinkling. It sounded full of iron filings. Trying to kill this train of thought, she lifted her glass, but the vibration of the engine made the surface of the wine tremble and she saw it as a rippling sea.