Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Calliope swayed a little on the invisible swell — just enough to remind George that he was afloat. The last grey shoulder of cliff had gone and the whole world was water now, with George its hub. He carried the circular horizon with him as he inched eastwards along his magnetic track at five and a quarter knots. The tide, such as it was, was with him too: the Channel, slowly filling up with green Atlantic water, was a sluggish river, its current easing the boat over the ground away from Cornwall to Plymouth and beyond. To his Dead Reckoning position, George added a mile and a half for the fair tide. How was it that old Prynne explained the term? “The ancients,” the Commander said, “always called an uncharted sea a ‘dead’ sea. Dead Reckoning is how you feel your way through an unknown world. It is exactly the same method that a blind man uses to make his way across a room. He counts his steps.” To prove the point, Ives had been blindfolded and despatched on a tricky voyage across the sandpit and the putting green to Admin, where he collided with Lieutenant Wates and sank.

George, following the drill, reported his course and position to Falmouth Coastguard over the radio telephone. “Destination not yet known,” he said. “I am a white, ketch-rigged trawler yacht. One person on board. Over.”

“Will you spell your vessel’s name please. Over.”

George said: “I spell: Charlie Alpha Lima Lima India Oscar Papa Echo. Over.” It was nice to find the jargon coming back pat on cue, like being able to speak Portuguese again.

“Thank you, Calliope . Have a pleasant voyage. Out, and listening on 16.”

George left the radio switched on, for company. He wasn’t alone: beyond the rim of haze, the Channel was full of ships. He listened to their captains calling.

“Par Pilots, Par Pilots, this is Vivacity, Vivacity, Vivacity . Over.”

No answer. Vivacity sounded fretful and down in the mouth as her captain repeated his appeal for his lost pilot. Far away on the starboard bow there was — not so much a ship as the shadow of a ship, suspended high in the sky. George saw her masts and deckworks faintly printed, like an over-exposed photo, on the air. Christ, but she wasn’t so far away at all! A moment later her wash came rolling in out of the haze. Calliope tipped and lurched. George heard a doggish scuffle going on down below. His books must be falling about over the saloon floor. When he looked for the ship again, she was gone.

“Benevolence, Benevolence, Benevolence . This is Fidelity, Fidelity . Do you read, please? Over …”

Lulled by the voices on the VHF, by the even rumble of the diesel and by the cradle motion of the water, George felt himself drifting off track. He checked the compass card as it swayed against the lubberline, but it was steady: 090, 092, 094, 093. Right on course. The autopilot was ticking as smoothly as a clock, and the spokes of the wheel shifted, a fraction of an inch at a time, back and forth, back and forth, as the boat felt for its heading. The merchant navy chaps all called the autopilot Lazy Mike: with Lazy Mike standing his watch at the wheel, George was free to get on with the serious business of navigation.

Known Point of Departure … A guillemot dived to port, making a clean hole in the water. George patted his pockets, searching for pipe and tobacco. The sea ahead was as uniform as the silvering on a mirror: the horizon swivelled round its edge as if the boat was turning in slow circles, while the compass stayed on 093, wedged there, apparently, by a piece of grit in the works. George wasn’t fooled by this old dodge. He sucked on his empty pipe and willed the horizon to stop moving. It steadied for a moment, like the compass card, and began to spin the other way. Dizzied, George sat at the chart table: with a pair of dividers he measured off six nautical miles and applied them to his speculative pencil line over the wreck-strewn sea floor.

Paddington Station . With Alex Maitland. Yes. January of ’44. The sea did funny things to one’s subconscious: it seemed as if the bright haze ahead was lifting, to disclose something that he thought he’d left far astern. Filling his pipe, watching out for flotsam, he headed for this unexpected seamark.

It was the sense of letdown he felt first. He hadn’t been to London since he was a child. He’d hoped for some dramatic pandemonium — searchlights, sirens, sandbags. But there was nothing like that. The city looked insomniac and dingy. No-one bothered even to carry his gasmask any more. On the cab ride to Alex’s house in Earls Court they saw bombsites already looking like ruins from some other, ancient war, fading behind a tangle of loosestrife and nettle. The people on the streets were pallid, fat and spotty, as if they’d spent the last few years doing nothing but guzzle porridge. In their rationbook clothes they looked turned out on the cheap, like so many pieces of utility furniture.

Alex said: “Don’t you love London’s dear old ugly mug?”

George didn’t, but said yes, he did, because he was still in awe of Alex, who’d been to Harrow and smoked Russian cigarettes through a holder. He was also rather hoping to fall in love with Alex’s sister, not yet met. It was Melissa (he’d already fallen in love with her name) who’d asked Alex to bring a friend to Mrs Holland’s dance.

“Lissa says there isn’t a man left in London. I think she’s expecting me to bring the entire Navy.”

George feared for his church hall quickstep, but phoned his father to say that his leave had been cancelled. In the cabin he shared with Alex on the corvette Larkspur he practised the slow-slow-quick-quick-slow routine, holding a cushion to his chest. The cushion was Melissa, whose picture was conveniently pinned up over Alex’s bunk between Mae West and Norma Shearer.

He didn’t fall in love with Melissa. Neither Alex nor her photo had revealed that she was built like a beanpole and talked non-stop through her nose. Apparently she’d been going around with a bunch of greyjobs, and her word of the moment was “wizard”. It was wizard that George had been able to show up, simply wizard; Alex was looking absolutely wizard, and the news of his impending second stripe and transfer to destroyers was too wizard for words. George, aghast at the thought of the way he’d held Melissa cheek to cheek, squarely blamed Melissa for leading him up the garden path.

The dance, at someone’s house in South Kensington, was a revelation. The blackout curtains, which were up on all the windows, weren’t there to hide the place from attack by the Germans. It was English eyes that these people must have been afraid of — the envious, prying eyes of the men and women out on the street. For, as you passed through the hallway with its marble pillars, you entered a world where there were no shortages, no rationing, no war … just pots and pots of gaiety and money. A Negro in a red tuxedo was conducting a jazz band. There was a man with champagne in an ice bucket. (Whoever managed to get champagne — or ice — in 1944? And how?)

“Tricia seems to have rustled up quite a decent crowd,” Alex said.

“Oh, wizard! Shampoo!” said the gregious Melissa.

George stared. He had never seen such people. London people . They shouted and pealed at each other over the noise of the music. Everybody knew everybody, and everybody had that expensive, freshly laundered smell of eau de cologne and special soap. George felt embarrassed in his new dress uniform: as far as he could see, he and Alex were the only men in the room who weren’t wearing d.j.’s. (Surely they couldn’t all be conchies?)

He danced once, stiffly, out of duty, with Melissa, then found himself alone on the edge of a particularly loud group. A fat man with thick lips and a bloated, bullfrog face was bawling like a baby: “Dull! Dull! Dull! Dull!” He glared shortsightedly at George for a moment and said, “I think I am quite possibly the dullest man on earth”, as if he expected George to contradict him. George didn’t. He gazed back at the man, involuntarily fascinated, like a rabbit in the headlights of a motor car. He stared at the very dead carnation which the man wore in the lapel of his overtight, grease-spotted dinner jacket and at the flecks of white rime at the corners of the man’s mouth. The man clicked his fingers at George as if he was summoning a waiter. “I mean, just look at Johnny here. Johnny’s not dull at all. Johnny’s making history , don’t you see!”