Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Fuddle-headed, George did his best to concentrate on hauling the jib in against the wind and wrapping the end of the rope around the wooden cleat. When he turned round, though, his father was still there, staring at the sea with much the same sort of suspicious disdain that he might have shown to a rally of Primitive Methodists. His lips were pursed, his eyes narrowed against the sun.

“You look cold,” George said. The rector’s dress was hopelessly wrong for a mid-March morning out at sea. “Shouldn’t you be wearing something warmer?”

His father shook his head distractedly. When he turned his face to George, it moved stiffly, like a tortoise’s, above the wattles of his neck.

“Mightn’t it be a good idea to wait for a while, old boy? And see how you both feel about it in six months’ time? Don’t you think?”

Calliope leaned to starboard in a long gust. The rector, arms spread along the gunwale, opened his mouth and let out a small bubble of fright. He’d never been good on boats. Crossing the Irish Sea, in a flat calm, from Liverpool to the Isle of Man in ’39, he spent the entire passage sitting rigid in a corner of the saloon holding The Times upside down in front of his face.

He said: “Of course, Angela does seem a frightfully nice girl.” Then, “What do you say, old boy — about giving it six months?”

Nice? Nice? How dare his father call Angela nice! George said: “We’re not waiting. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, Daddy, but there happens to be a war on. Chaps are getting killed, you know.”

His father gazed at the Eddystone, the one stable point in a gently rolling world. He looked as if he wanted to put his arms around the lighthouse and cling to it for dear life.

“Yes,” he said; “there’s that, of course. Though it’s an argument that could cut two ways, old boy.”

“There’s no ‘argument’ about it,” George said. “It’s fixed, Daddy.”

The rector’s hands fluttered on the gunwale. His unhappy eyes were hunting for his son. For a sickmaking moment, George saw that his father was actually a few years younger than he was himself. Poor bloody sod. He was muffing it so badly, too. George wanted to shake some life into him — if only he could make a present to his father of the words that the rector couldn’t find, perhaps …

“You’re only nineteen—”

Oh, damn you, Daddy, for that stupid, frightened, bald, uncalculating move!

“I’m old enough to be an officer! I’m old enough to fight this fucking war!”

“George!”

“All right, then, lovely war! Nice war! Pretty little war! Whatever you want! But just wake up, will you, to the fact that I’m a man and this is my life and I am running it, and if you don’t like it you can lump it!”

The words tasted leaden and stale in his own mouth. It was George, after all, and not the rector, who needed a fresh script. He felt lumbered, condemned to rehearse this old degrading patter of every son to every father. Poor father, poor son, trapped in the same leaky boat.

Pat on cue, his father said: “The last thing that either your mother or I want, old boy, is for you to be unhappy—”

“Then you won’t try and stop Angela and me from getting married—”

“No, George, I shan’t do that.”

The rector looked away at the curling wash behind the boat; the wind tugged the black half moon of his clerical stock clear of his pullover and made his thin jacket balloon round his chest. What a pair of scarecrows they must look, George thought: two old buffers, peevishly wrangling out of sight of land, one in a boater, one in a baseball cap … you’d have to laugh. But he couldn’t bear the thought of what was coming next.

His father reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and held out a sealed envelope to George.

“Every happiness, old boy,” he mumbled. Then he said it again, too loudly, “Every happiness.”

So his father had known all along that he’d lose. The envelope was addressed “For George and Angela, with love from Deny’s and Mary.” There was something uncomfortable in seeing his parents’ Christian names like that; they looked nude.

“Thanks awfully,” George said.

“You’d better open it, old boy. Save the suspense …” His father pretended to transfer all his attention to a tickle behind his ear, but the boat rolled again and he had to clutch at the toerail, his legs stiffly splayed, the wide turn-ups of his shiny trousers flapping.

Inside the envelope, a cheque for seventy-five guineas. For George’s father, it was a fortune, a king’s ransom. Seventy-five guineas, from the rector, whose favourite word was “rectitude”! To write a cheque like that, he must have lain awake at nights, conducting an auction with himself and watching the price of marriage steepen, from twenty to twenty-five, past thirty, and rocket through the ceiling of fifty. It was no wonder that the writing on the cheque didn’t look like his father’s hand at all but had an artificial copperplate precision, as if every letter had taken several seconds to inscribe. It was a cheque to make one doubt one’s eyesight, a cheque to frame and publish, a cheque perhaps designed to announce that the Greys were perfectly well able to hold up their heads with the Haighs of the world.

This, though, wasn’t what struck George about the cheque when he first saw it. His first thought was that he’d better tell Angela that it was for a hundred; seventy-five was so shabbily, transparently middle class. Seventy-five, in fact (and he hated that five), was Just about Typical. The other thing about the cheque was that it came from Lloyds Bank. Angela’s family all banked at Coutts, and George was planning to transfer his account there too. The trouble with Lloyds’ cheques was that they gave one away so, like cheap shirts.

“Thanks awfully, Daddy,” he said, a little less enthusiastically than when he’d taken the unopened envelope. “I know it’ll … come in jolly useful.”

His father watched the cheque disappear into George’s pocket as if he was following a conjuring trick in which turtle doves were going to sprout from George’s cuffs any moment now. He laughed — a dry, embarrassed little titter. “I thought you’d prefer money, old boy — when Mummy and I got married, all we seemed to get from people was bone china and sheets.”

George said: “Mr Haigh says he thinks he can rustle up an unused ’39 MG. Apparently the company owes him a favour.”

Suddenly sag-shouldered, the rector stared blankly out to sea. A broken fish crate floated past with two gulls standing on it face to face like a pair of bookends. The rector’s voice when it came back to George was thin and distant, filtered by the breeze.

“A motor car, George? Where do you think you’re going to get the petrol from to run a thing like that?”

George ducked his head inside the wheelhouse to check the compass course; stepping back, he found he had the cockpit to himself. With the engine switched off, there was only the slop and gurgle of his freshwater supply in its fifty-gallon tank, the irregular ticking of the autopilot and the creak of the planking on the frames as the hull flexed to fit the sea. He went below to put a kettle on the stove for coffee.

Down in the saloon, it was like being in an echo chamber full of noises. There were whispers, the rustle of dresses in a room, the sound of doors being opened and closed, a woman sobbing, a man’s distant laughter. No wonder people heard and saw such odd things when they sailed alone: listening to Calliope as she lolloped through the waves was a bit like putting one’s ear to a crack in the wall when one’s neighbours were throwing a party. It was lonely and cosy all at once.