Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Diana stared at the little numbers on the chart in front of her. If you really tried, you could manage your own mind as he was managing this boat. You could steer it away from danger and get home safely after all. She wasn’t a believer any more. She couldn’t pray, but she could still use the words. On the white paper sea of the chart she made words happen until they were almost as clear as if they’d been printed there. They were from Thomas à Kempis, her favourite. Once, she’d had great chunks of The Imitation of Christ off by heart. She could come up with some good fragments, even now.

Without a friend, thou canst not well live … No, not that one. She focused on the chart again. The boat dived and aimed itself at the sky.

Occasions of adversity best discover how great virtue or strength each man hath. For occasions do not make a man frail, but they show what he is. Here, men are proved as gold in a furnace …

“A calliope’s a merry-go-round steam organ, isn’t it?” George Grey said.

“What? Oh … yes, they have them at carnivals in California.”

“This is more like a switchback, I’m afraid.”

“Big Dipper.” On the chart she saw: If thou wilt withdraw thyself from speaking vainly, and from gadding idly, as also from hearkening after novelties and rumours, thou shalt find leisure enough for meditation on good things. The greatest saints avoided the society of men and did rather choose to live to God in secret. One said, “As oft as I have been among men, I returned home less of a man than I was before.” She thought: it’s OK, I’m in control.

Yet every time she looked at it, the sea was scarier. It was sudsy and tumbled and shoreless. She wanted to ask what time George Grey expected to get home, but the look of the water made the question sound idiotic in her head; the noise of it, too, as it rushed at the hull and the wind went whining and crackling round the masts and rigging. Will we be back in time for tea? didn’t seem the thing to say.

When they were in the dark trough of the next wave, he said, “It’s odd, you know …” His voice was flat, as if he was starting out on a technical lecture. “I didn’t know about Sheila … my daughter’s baby until last night, when you told me. I was rather … rattled by it, in fact. She hadn’t said a word to me, but she goes round talking about it on the television.” He steered the boat up a long grey slope of foamy sea. “One wonders what one’s done to deserve it.”

It is better oftentimes and safer that a man should not have many consolations in this life. She said: “Do you believe we ever deserve what we get?”

“Oh, yes. Sometimes,” he said. “Things like income tax. Unfinished crosswords. Flat feet.”

“When it comes to being mean, parents and children knock husbands and wives into a cocked hat.”

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose I do deserve it, really. Don’t you loathe your ancestors? I do, and most of the poor sods were perfectly harmless.”

“The ones in the pictures …”

“Yes. It’s bloody awful, you know, to realize that you’re turning into an ancestor yourself. Bloody awful.”

As the boat lurched suddenly sideways and she grabbed for the strap, she saw herself and George as two peas, rattling loosely in one pod. When they came upright again, she said, “I always wanted children.”

“You … haven’t …?”

“No. I got pregnant when I was twenty-two. It was just when my first single was coming out. I had it aborted. They managed to louse up my … equipment.” She was amazed to hear those words hanging there in the wheelhouse, all mixed up with the noise of the sea. It was something she never spoke of to anyone. Why here? Why to him?

“What was … the record?”

“‘Please Don’t Write Me a Letter’.” She laughed — a long ripple of relief. “It must have been ahead of its time. It sold around nine copies.”

“What foul luck.” He looked round at her for a moment. “And the father? Who was he?”

“He was a conman.”

“Fathers often are.”

“He was my agent.”

“Look — there’s your land. Over there.”

She couldn’t see it at first. Then, between waves, she saw the greasy smear in the sky, far higher up than she’d expected. It was almost overhead. And it was on the wrong side . It wasn’t Cornwall at all. The boat rolled badly. She felt helplessly disoriented. He’d been playing some fool Alice in Wonderland trick on her all along.

She said dully, “Is that … France?”

“No, it’s the Head.”

“St Cadix Head?” She didn’t believe him.

“See the beacon? Up there, to the left?”

It was true. He was right, but it still looked like another country. There were no houses, no trees. It was a misty mountain of granite. It didn’t look like anyone’s home, let alone hers. It was only when they moved into its shelter that she realized that it must have been raining heavily all afternoon. Out at sea it was as if there was no weather at all. Now she saw that it was one of those ordinary March days when you couldn’t see to the other side of the estuary; a day that would flood the stream in the garden and drown the early primroses.

“How far out from land did we go?”

“Oh, no distance, really. Two and a half miles, perhaps.”

“I thought we were way out on the ocean.”

“It always seems like that when the visibility gets bad.” He turned the wheel and the boat swung round in the calm, rain-pocked water, until the sails began to flap like lines of washing. When he left the wheelhouse to pull the sails down from the masts, she said, “Can I help?” but he said, “No — stay in the dry, there’s no point in both of us getting wet.”

She enjoyed watching him working up at the front of the boat. As he gathered in the unruly sodden canvas, his big underlip jutting forward in an expression of angry concentration, he looked like a man fighting with eagles. His arms and head were tangled in the flailing sails — he was losing — then he conquered them. Binding them down to their wooden spar, he raised his head, checked the drifting land and smiled at Diana through the window; a hesitant, lopsided victor’s smile. His shirt-tail had come unstuck from his trousers and was wagging in the wind. She wanted to tuck it in for him.

They motored up the estuary through the rain. Watching the slate roofs slide by, she found something illicit in this sailor’s view of the village. Between their setting out this morning and their coming home this afternoon, St Cadix seemed to have slipped off-centre, to have lost a measure of its reality. Diana inspected it with the kind of caution (wanting to believe in it, but alert to each false note) that she felt when the curtain went up on a stage set. She saw Jellaby’s van, parked like a prop on Lower Marine Drive. The gilt hands on the church clock were stuck (a hackneyed touch on the part of the designer) at twenty to eleven. The wet and rigid flag outside the Yacht Club was a shade too new; and Betty Castle, dismounting from her sit-up-and-beg bicycle by the post office, looked like a character in a tedious old-fashioned play.

George, at the wheel, nodded at the waterfront. “There you are. Home Sweet Home …”

“It doesn’t look real.”

“Oh, it’s real enough, all right. Too bloody real for me. Do you know that bitch with the bicycle?”

“Betty Castle.”

“Yes. How does she manage to make herself so ubiquitous? She’s the genius of the place.”

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”

“What?”

“Practice, practice, practice.”

The boat turned and held still on the incoming tide. George nursed it alongside the quay, nudging it into a slot between the scallop boats. He stepped ashore with an armful of rope; Diana went downstairs to put a kettle of water on the gas stove.