Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

She said: “You’ve hurt your hand.”

“It’s nothing. Just a scratch.”

When the wind came, she felt the boat tilt and stiffen, the red sails setting as smooth and hard as if they’d been moulded on to the masts in painted plaster. The sea, too, suddenly changed texture, scissored by the wind into little houndstooth crests that went spitting past the rail. With the engine off, she listened to the busy noise of wood and water, of slaps and creaks and gurgles. Spray was breaking over the boat’s nose, wetting the sail at the front and making a bright corona in the air. Diana, gripping a wooden handle at the back of the wheelhouse, hardly dared to breathe for fear of breaking the spell. It was like … well, nothing on earth, nothing on land. It felt as if the boat was dangling between the top of the sky and the bottom of the sea, as weightless as a money spider on its thread of luminous gum.

It made Diana dizzy, but it was the nicest sort of dizziness, like dreams of floating through the air. In need of ballast, she looked across to the rim of dark land, and found the land gone. It had vanished clean off the face of the sea, and the boat was in the dead centre of a gigantic disc of squally water. She searched the far sky for hills, for Cornwall. There was nothing there at all, and Diana felt the first, niggling spasm of alarm.

George Grey was in the wheelhouse, steering by hand now. The boat lurched as she stepped inside, and she lost her balance and collided into him. He smelled of diesel oil and the stuff that he used on his hair.

“Sorry—” she said. He steadied her with his arm, and for the second time she had the vivid, disturbing sense of having found a stranger in her bed. This time, though, there was something dangerous and arousing in the thought.

“Don’t worry. It always takes one a while to find one’s sea-legs. You’re doing very well.” He was looking at the sea, not at her, and she found herself irrationally resenting his distracted attention.

“I can’t see the land any more.”

“Oh, you’re much safer out of sight of land. There’s less to bump into.”

“Just you.”

“Yes—” He laughed; a light, dry, naval man’s laugh. “There’s always me, of course.”

“Do you know where we are?”

“Just … there.” He leaned over from the wheel and pointed to a pencilled cross — one of many — on the chart. It was an inch or two away from a diagonal line which stretched out across a white sea dotted with small printed numbers.

“Are these … fathoms?”

“No, metres.” He looked over her shoulder at the chart. “Thirty-two metres. That’s about a hundred feet.”

“Is that all?” She was disappointed. “It feels … much deeper,” she said, and immediately felt silly for saying it. But George Grey said, “Yes, doesn’t it?” and she watched the silver bristles round his mouth catch the sun as he smiled. “I always think that’s the best part — the feeling of all that water underneath.”

“Doesn’t it sometimes scare you?”

“Oh, yes. I suppose that’s really its point.”

It had begun to scare Diana. Even wedged in the seat by the chart table, she was having to cling on tight to stop herself from falling as the boat rolled and wallowed. The little pointed waves had changed into long furrows and ridges of sea with dribbling crests of foam.

“When do we turn round?”

“We turned. Ten minutes ago.”

“ Did we?” The sea looked just the same. “But the sails — they’re out on the same side of the boat.”

“Yes, I eased off the sheets; we’re running now.”

He was snowing her with salty talk. Do I trust this man? The boat slewed, plunged downwards, and came up bobbing like the guillemot. Diana thought: I hardly even know the guy. She saw a wave building up behind them. It was big, untidy, all lumps and bulges. At its top, the water was being churned into frothy cream. This isn’t me. The wave was moving faster than the boat: it came rolling up and under the back end, lifting them so that Diana felt her stomach drop and saw the sky slide down.

“Arthur,” George Grey said, spinning the spokes of the wheel.

“What?” She heard the shake in her voice.

“You call the big ones Arthur. It helps to make them feel smaller.”

She laughed. Too loud. Too madly. “Every wave looks like Arthur to me.”

“It’s a bit sloppy. But the boat’s quite happy.”

“It’s nice to know that someone is. Oh God — Arthur’s big brother is right behind us.”

George laughed. The boat rolled on its side as if it was going to go right over, and came up straight again, leaving Diana clinging to the strap above her head.

“She’s looking after us very nicely indeed,” George said.

“Well,” Diana said, at least an octave above her normal pitch, “anyway, I’m not throwing up. I think that’s about all that can be said for me.”

“You see — you’re a natural sailor.”

She wasn’t reassured. It was quite possible, she thought, that George Grey was crazy — really and truly crazy, like the people who told you, in the flattest, most commonsensical way, that they were reincarns, or God, or extra-terrestrial visitors. The man’s voice was somehow too dangerously normal for the circumstances.

“How close are we to land?” she said.

“Oh … not far now.” He was smiling .

The waves were overtaking the boat like badly wrapped parcels. The sea flared and collapsed under her feet. Diana felt her old dread surfacing in her like a forgotten friend. She recognized it with a rush of panic.

There’d been a time when the world felt like this most Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, or Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays; a time when Diana couldn’t hear of an aeroplane taking off with a friend in it without seeing it crash. Wherever she went, she brought with her a sense of imminent catastrophe. If she sat in a bar among the other drinkers, she saw cancers, automobile accidents, cardiac arrests, murders and suicides. Her dreams were full of deaths, sometimes her own, more often those of friends, acquaintances, total strangers. She saw the mailman dead in a dream; in another, Bobby Kennedy was shot six months before it happened, and Diana felt sick with guilt when she saw it on Walter Cronkite; for one appalling day, she knew her dream had somehow caused the real assassination.

That was when she started going to Dr Nussbaum. He helped a little. Later, she found Father McKinley, who had helped a lot. The low ceiling of dread, under which she lived like a crouched animal, slowly lifted. Inch by inch, corner by corner, until she began to breathe again. Supermarkets were her worst places. She had to dare herself to enter them, and by the time she reached the checkouts she was sometimes trembling so violently that no-one would share the line with her. In the Piggly Wiggly one morning she realized that the ceiling was gone. That was all over. Never, please God, would she ever feel like that again.

Now, to her horror, she was seeing George Grey dead. She couldn’t see how he was dead: it wasn’t an obvious thing like being drowned at sea. It was the bristles on his chin. They were going on growing . He was dead and his beard was alive. It was luxuriant, spreading, and the face behind it was like a lump of tallow, with an opaque coating of blue film over the open eyes.

“Watch out, it’s Arthur again,” he said. “You’re doing fine.”

Arthur was a relief. It made her hold on tight and think of nothing but sea as the boat rolled and slid over the breaking white top of the wave.

“We touched seven and a half knots just then. I didn’t know she could do it. And that’s under sail alone.”