Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

The wind blew all night and the rain came in sharp squalls, making the lagoon outside her window sound as if it was coming up to the boil. She had read the Dick Francis before. Her dreams were scrambled: there were jellyfish in them, foreign voices, creaming waves, a car chase along an aerial expressway in which her mother was driving and Diana lay in the back seat in a foetal crouch. She woke abruptly with a frown on her face, with the early birds.

She breakfasted on yoghurt and cigarettes, stubbing out the butts in the emptied carton. When the radio woke up too, she listened to a man reciting wheat and fatstock prices. Then the weather forecast for shipping came on. For the first time ever, she paid attention to the metrical litany of the sea areas. Dogger, Fisher, German Bight … Sole, Lundy, Fastnet … Shannon, Bailey, Malin, Rockall … She didn’t know where any of them were, but there was wild weather in them all: gales, severe gales, storms force ten. She found these warnings exciting. They translated for her into seas as torn and racing as the bilious sky overhead, with matchwood arks being hurled from crest to crest. When the man went on to read the proper news, about picket lines, abducted children and foreign wars, it sounded irrelevant and remote. When he said the word “summit”, she saw it as the frothy peak of an enormous tumbling wave.

At 8.30, gumbooted against the wet, she pushed open the kitchen door and had to lean on the wind to get out of the house. The garden was a drenched and sullen tangle; the stream had turned overnight into a full-blown river, the colour of weak cocoa. It had broken loose from Diana’s artful conduit and was pouring straight down the side of the hill. Close to the beach, with its rim of dirty scud, it fanned out over a delta of grey shale. Diana paddled across it to the car. She got halfway up the track before the rear wheels started to spin in the soft mud and the bonnet went hunting right and left as the car put down its roots and refused to budge.

It was raining again. She ran down the hill, slipping and sliding, with the wind blowing her skirt up into her face and the rain stinging her wrists. When she reached the kitchen door she was laughing out loud, high on the gale and on her night of damaged sleep. Looking back, she saw she’d left the car door open. The wind was catching it and the stranded car, like a shiny black slug, looked as if it was feebly signalling for help.

Why had she tried to drive to the village in the first place? She couldn’t remember. She felt stupid, soaked and happy. Something had happened; exactly what she couldn’t place, but it was to do with the sea, and it was as if all the separate bits of the world had been shaken and rearranged while she’d clung to the rope strap in the wheelhouse and the combers had come bulging up behind. Diana felt lighter, somehow more possible , than she’d done for an age. The only pity, she thought, surprising herself, was that George wasn’t around. It would have been nice to come upon him at the wheel in the sitting room, piloting the cottage through the turbulent morning; this navigator who always knew where he was, her new foulweather friend.

Foulweather Friend. It was a title. It would certainly work as a refrain. It had been a million years since Diana had found words fitting themselves to musical phrases in her head. Raking the wood ash out of the grate, feeling pleasantly silly, she experimented with foulweather friend. When she’d been in the business, her voice was a choirboy treble; it had sunk to contralto in real life, but the voice inside her skull was still fine and high. Melody Maker always used to call it “famished”, but Diana thought of it as just prettily slim. She lit the Calor Gas poker under a fresh pile of damp logs.

In Biscay and the German Bight,

Malin, Hebrides and Wight,

I’m counting on you.

(Can I count on you,

My foulweather friend?)

She conjured a lot of oom-pah in the bass and fluting, Severe Gale sounds from the woodwind section. Pine smoke ballooned from the fire.

Nutzo . Still, that was one of the consolations of living alone; there was no-one to catch you out being childish. Or hackneyed.

I’m feeling blue.

(Don’t know about you,

My foulweather friend.)

Then the telephone rang. Apparently George had caught her out. She put on her gruff gardening voice to cover her tracks. But it wasn’t George; it was Verity Caine.

“One teeny favour, darling, if you’ve got a moment …” Verity Caine tinkled on like a stuck shop bell; Diana drew a small boat on the Truro telephone directory.

You had to go through the operator to reach Montedor. Even Guinea-Bissau was on the direct dialling system now, but the antique Portuguese telephone equipment of Bom Porto was beyond the reach of modern communications technology. Vera’s phone had a handle on it that you had to wind round and round when you made outgoing calls, and George was afraid that an incoming one from England might throw the instrument into a fit of hysteria. Nevertheless, he rang the international operator and gave him Vera’s number. There was an unpromising silence on the other end.

“It’s in Africa,” George said.

“Modena, Monarco, Montana, Monte Cristo, Montego Bay, Montenegro, two Montereys and four, no five, Montezumas. Sorry. I’ve got you. Montedor.”

“That’s the one.”

“One minute, caller,” the operator said, with unwise optimism, George thought. Ten minutes later, after a wide variety of clicks, dialling tones and voices on crossed lines, the operator said, “Lousy weather. What’s it like down there, caller?”

“Very windy,” George said.

“And that doesn’t help.” There was the sound of a ringing bell somewhere half-way across the world. “We were going down to Weston-super-Mare this weekend. Looks as if that trip is going to be rained off.”

“Oh, what a shame.” It didn’t sound at all like Vera’s bell.

“I’m going to try re-routing you now.”

“Yes, do that.”

“There’s nothing worse, is there? A wet weekend with kids on your hands and the wife sick …”

“Can’t you lock them up in a cinema?” George said.

“One’s ten months, one’s twenty, and the other’s three. I’d like to see the Gaumont after they’d been through it. They’d beat the Blitz. Oh, hello, Senegal! Is that Senegal? This is Bristol, Youkay. We’re trying to reach a number in Montedor. That’s Mike Oscar November Tango Echo Delta Oscar Romeo. Mon-tee-dor.”

“Monte- dor ,” George interrupted for Senegal’s benefit.

There were more clicks, followed by a noise like a brush fire. Then a clear voice came through, American in accent but African in its glottal warmth and depth. “We have congestion on all lines to Montedor. You try one other day, Bristol-Youkay.”

“Thank you, Senegal. Did you follow that, caller? Congestion. Like my wife’s trouble.”

“Well,” George said, “thanks for trying, anyway.”

On the quay, T. Jellaby was sitting in the passenger seat of his van. He was eating cheese and pickle sandwiches for lunch and studying the boats as they bumped and rolled on their moorings. He had, as he found it necessary to admit to himself, a pretty fertile imagination — well, more fertile than most, anyway — but those boats … you only had to look at them for ideas to come faster than you could handle them. He stared at the cross-trees on their masts. That was obvious, of course. But there were things you could do with winches , for instance, that would boggle your mind. He bit deep into his last sandwich. That was something else he must remember to tell Mum: lately she’d been going a bit too easy on the cayenne pepper.