Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

The saloon smelled of the voyage. It had a strong swampy odour that she recognized as the smell that always hung around after one had enjoyed a dangerous pleasure. When George came back, he looked exhausted. His face was slack, his skin seemed translucent. There were raw grazes on his hands.

He said: “I’m sorry. I’m afraid we got caught out there. My fault. I should’ve taken more notice of the barograph. Was it hell for you?”

She was looking at the framed photograph of the fat black woman on the wall. “No …” she said. “It was … extraordinary. Like … dreaming.”

“Yes,” he said, sounding vague. “But there was nothing wrong with the boat. She was perfect.”

She was glad to see, when he poured whisky into tumblers, that his hand was shivering a little. Seeing her noticing, he said, “I always get the shakes after going to sea. Don’t know why. After I stood my first full watch alone … in a corvette … I had to be practically tied into my bunk, I was such a rattletrap.”

Diana rummaged in her bag. She shook its contents out over the saloon cushions, as if she was sowing the twists of Kleenex, chapsticks, blunt pencils, keys, small change, empty match-books, the reel of measuring tape and the crumpled letter from Harry, like seeds.

“What have you lost?”

“My cigarettes.”

“You haven’t smoked all day.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, finding them. “I’ll catch up.”

The kettle came whistling to the boil. While Diana made coffee, George scribbled with a fountain pen in the black account book that he called “the ship’s log”. Later, he went upstairs and she was able to sneak a look at what he’d written. It wasn’t much.

Arr. St Cadix 1640. Log: 0026.7. Wind S by W, 5 gusting to 6. Vis mod, then poor. Bar: 1019, falling rapidly. Check drip on sterngland. Renew jib halyard. Otherwise A-OK.

Diana felt wounded. She didn’t figure in the story at all.

“Someone,” said T. Jellaby, “is getting his leg over.”

“So long as it’s not you,” Vic Toms said. Vic had come into the shop, after hours, to swap “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for “The Return of the Jedi”.

“Captain Birdseye.”

“Oh?” Vic was reading the label on the cassette. He was a careful man. Most people just looked at the title and the names of the stars. Vic went for the small print. He wanted to know the directors and the cameramen and the people who did all the costumes and make-up and stuff. His lips moved when he read.

“Yes,” T. Jellaby said. “That old reverend’s son. Up the hill.”

“The one that’s got Dunnett’s boat?”

“That’s the one.”

“I could have told him a thing or two about she , if he’d have asked. But he didn’t ask me. He got a surveyor down. From Plymouth.”

“Old bugger’s knocking off Screwy Julie. You know. Down in Harmony Bay. Took her out today on that boat of his for a spot of jig-a-jig at sea. I watched them come in. Shagged out wasn’t the word for it. He must have had her from Christmas to breakfast time.”

“She’s getting past it,” Vic Toms said, putting a pound down on the counter. “I went over she last fall. There was rot in the stempost. I told old Dunnett to get an X-ray on them keelbolts. Then he gets this surveyor in from Plymouth. He comes along with an itsy-bitsy hammer … Won’t find nothing that way. Dunnett said to me how much he ought to ask for she. ‘Not a lot,’ I said. ‘Not a lot.’” He laughed.

“Eleven grand,” T. Jellaby said.

“That’s what Dad told him. But Dad didn’t know nothing about the rot. He only knowed she when she was Tremlett’s boat.”

“He only wants a floating knocking shop.”

“He better not knock too hard, then. Not with all that soft wood in the stempost.”

T. Jellaby snugged the pound note down in the till.

“What was the name of the bloke that directed “2001”? Has he made any more?”

“Search me,” T. Jellaby said.

After Vic Toms had gone, T. Jellaby realized that Captain Birdseye had given him an idea for a video. He often got ideas for videos, but if you wanted to get into the video game seriously, you had to have a gimmick. Nobody, so far as he knew, had used a boat before. Suppose there was this boat … with three girls … One of them would be very fat. She’d be called “Skipper”. And they’d run it as a regular floating knocking shop. For old blokes, why not? One at a time. Like ocean cruises. The girls would dress up like sailors, in striped jerseys and bell-bottom trousers, then they’d strip off as soon as they were out of sight of land, and the old blokes, who thought they’d signed up for a trip round the bay, would go bananas with fright and lust.

It had definite possibilities. You could do a lot with the sea … Just when they were making the old bloke come, you’d cut to crashing waves and foam and that. It’d be artistic. Like if the fat girl, Skipper, went down on an old bloke, you could have a big wave crashing down over the front of the boat. Then there were all those ropes. They’d come in handy. The three of them could tie up the old bloke and flog him in the sun.

Nice. The trouble with most videos was they looked plain sordid. This one would be different. Healthy, open air stuff, with plenty of sea spray and sunsets. T. Jellaby had started on a video last year — a modest effort with Tracey Pengelly and the Blazeby kid from the estate in a big foam bath — but he’d run into problems with the lighting of it. The lighting on this one would be a dead cinch.

Of course, you’d have to lens it in the summer and make out that it was in the Caribbean or the Med. The beach at Par could double for the Cote D’Azur on a sunny day. You’d just need some French signs around the place. And the girls would have to look brown … there was one in St Austell, half Indian, who was exactly the right colour. According to Mick Walsh, she was the town bike. “Skipper” would take more thinking about. Fat, definitely, but not blowsy. T. Jellaby saw a great smooth bum and the sort of cleavage that made you want to drop ice lollies in there. But tasteful. Like something carved in marble.

The really hard ones to find would be the old blokes themselves. It was obvious how they should look — straw boaters, blazers, canes, cricket trousers (would spats be a bit over the top? You could have some fun with spats) and crocodile-skin shoes. The tricky part would be to get the right kind of bloke to say yes. Maybe you shouldn’t tell them what you had in mind until it was too late — then the story in the video would be for real. T. Jellaby had to laugh when he saw the crazed old buggers being taken apart by Skipper and her crew, starkers except for their bright red espadrilles, with the boat rolling about somewhere off Dodman Point.

As he locked up the shop, he was daydreaming in titles. “Pussy Ahoy” … a bit crude, that. It needed something more innocent and frolicky. “Saucy Sailors” was closer to it. “Wet Dreams” was good, but too subtle. He rather liked the sound of “The Good Ship Naughty” . To be going on with, anyway. As for the boat, that Calliope would be just the job. But Captain Birdseye was a standoffish old fart, and T. Jellaby had his doubts as to whether he’d come in, in return for a slice of the action.

Harmony Cottage was out at sea. Diana felt the floor roll away under her feet and steadied herself by leaning on a joist as her kitchen tilted and yawed. She was landsick. She loaded a tray with Alka Seltzer, mineral water, a glass of hot milk and a thriller by Dick Francis that she thought she hadn’t read before, and carried it gingerly up to the bedroom. What did they call the stairs on ships? Companionways. Companion-less, she scaled her steep, uncarpeted companionway.