Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Of course. When she’d last called him, he had rabbitted on and on about going boating. His latest scheme was that he was going to sail around to London to see her. In his dinghy, or whatever. He bumbled and fluffed over the phone. It sounded to Sheila as if he was in danger of losing all of his remaining marbles.

“Father,” she said, “there are such things as trains , you know,” and tried to laugh him out of this infantile escapade. But he was unbudgeable. He said, “I’ll tie up to your doorstep. Won’t trouble you at all. Might be awfully glad of a warm bath, though. One gets rather smelly at sea.”

“Do take care, Father.”

“Roger. Will do.”

She was helpless. Everything about him grated on her now — the cracked gallantry, the old naval slang. She couldn’t deal with it at all. Not that she had ever got on with George; but the man she used to meet on his summer leaves hadn’t been like this. He’d been stiff, evasive, too polished by half, yet Sheila felt that if he only once relaxed his guard she might find someone there whom she could talk to. Well, there was no talking to the ramshackle figure on the far end of the phone.

“By the way,” he said, “I’ve grown a beard.”

“Really?” she said weakly.

“Yes. Not a patch on Tom’s, of course. Just a threadbare sort of chinwarmer, you know.”

“I look forward to seeing it,” Sheila said.

“I’m told it rather suits me,” he said with a glimmer of his old vanity, then spoiled it by saying, “I’m making a pretty thoroughgoing job of going to seed, you see.”

“Sea?” she said.

“Seed” said her father with his noncommittal upper-deck laugh.

For the rest of the day, scraps and echoes of this conversation kept on cropping up like burrs in Sheila’s head. She felt obscurely guilty. But of what? Then she felt indignant. Her father was breaking bounds.

“ETA ten days from now, with a bit of luck,” he’d said.

ETA? Oh, that. It really was too tiresome. She had stared out of the window of her study at the crocuses, already in full bloom on the back lawn. Tom must have planted them without telling her.

“I’ll call you up on the radio telephone when I get into the Thames.”

“Yes, do.” A crocus had fluttered up and settled in the tree. Sheila put her glasses on and looked more closely: all the crocuses were pigeons.

“Sheila?”

“Sorry, Father — you were saying?”

At 6.00, when the cheap rate started, her mother had rung. Sheila gave her a heavily edited report on George’s movements. “Hopeless! Simply hopeless!” her mother said, and Sheila tended to agree; but there was such undisguised satisfaction in her mother’s tone that she felt filially obliged to change the subject.

Now her father was sneaking into her dreams dressed up as a baby. Sheila didn’t think that fair at all. Sipping sweet tea by the window, she watched the birdbath and the piles of seasoning timber in the garden as they paled and sharpened in the dawn. In her notebook she wrote “Thomas Carlyle was …” but it was her father she was thinking of as she settled down to attack Carlyle.

Out on deck in the halflight it was dewy, damp and airless. The smell of dead fish and diesel fuel from the neighbouring boats seemed to have got deep inside George’s skull, where they mixed unsociably with the aftertaste of the whisky. He stood in a snakepit of wet coir ropes, hauling in hand over hand as he freed Calliope of her final attachment to Cornwall.

He reached out to the black and slimy stone of the quay wall and pushed, quite gently, easing the boat away from the berth. Her steep bow began to swing against the line of misty trees on the opposite shore. Her timbered bulk shifted like a sleeper turning slowly over in bed. George loved the mysterious tractability of the boat in the water: on land it was so damned hard to make anything shift the way you wanted it. Afloat, it was different: the pressure of a fingertip would move eleven tons of deadweight as cleanly and easily as if the boat was a brass washer on a film of oil. It made George, even with a hangover, feel a pleasant kinship with Hercules. Smiling emptily, he walked back from the bows to the wheelhouse where the engine grumbled underfoot in neutral, and started to pilot his estate out into the estuary.

Ahead, the water was a greenish gold, glossy as wax. Behind the boat, George’s wake tore and splintered it from shore to shore. He cut the revs to 1500, then 1000, until Calliope was inching past the town, quiet as a moth, trailing a skirt of gleaming ripples. He slipped by within a cable of the leading light on Culver Point: it winked at him inside its basket, a lazy red flash every ten seconds. In another minute, he was below Thalassa. For the very first time, he noticed the garden of the house — or rather its absence, for its outline had completely merged into the gorse and scrub of the surrounding cliff. His father’s precious cold frames and patent bird scarers had been swallowed up in the tangle.

“They say,” his father said with a little crow of scorn, “that the soil’s too poor to grow tomatoes here”, and led George out to a miniature glass pagoda that he’d put together out of broken frames and bits of string. With the air of a magician at a children’s party, he lifted the lid of this erection and pointed inside. In a cleft in the leaves something, undoubtedly, had happened: a single, hard green globule, about the size of a goat dropping. “What,” said his father, “do you suppose they’d call that? A pomegranate?” This miserable fruitlet was, he announced, “merely a prototype”. Next year, he was going to confound the people of St Cadix as he’d confounded his parishioners in Hampshire, with superior learning. He would bury them in hard green tomatoes to prove yet another of his indignant points.

But the next year he was dead, and George’s mother was buying her vegetables in tins and packets; an odd vice in which she took a lot of pleasure. “Have you heard of Surprise peas, dear?” she asked George. “Such a boon. You just pop them into boiling water and they swell up and turn green. They’re really rather clever.”

Steering the boat under the house, George wanted to apologize to his father about the garden. Had a lot on my plate, you know — always did mean to get round to it. He looked up at Thalassa’s narrow face. There were slates missing from the roof, and its black windows gaped. He noticed that an old lawnmower lay strangled inside the brown birdsnest of Russian Vine against the kitchen wall. Swinging the wheel hard to port, he snatched a last glance at the house. How absurd ever to have thought of it as home: the only homely thing about the place was his own eagerness to be away from it. He pushed the engine to full ahead. The rev counter dickered up to 2800 and a bluff and rolling wake began to build around Calliope’s stern. The deserted house stared after him, its porch and windows contracting in a joyless know-it-all smile.

The rocks at the harbourmouth were sinking and surfacing like turtles, but the sea itself was still. George steered between the rocks — feet planted wide on the wheelhouse floor, shoulders hunched, the long visor of his cap wagging rhythmically from side to side as he searched the water ahead. In the sharp morning air, the surface was riddled with faint twists and curlicues of smoke. George didn’t much like the look of what he saw: the dewpoint must be very low. Squaring up to the sea like a boxer, watching his footwork and his guard, he waited for it to make the first move. In the black account book that he kept on the shelf by the wheel, he wrote: