Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Making landfall, any landfall, had always been something to marvel over. George had half forgotten that peculiar twist of pleasure which went with seeing a new country come up from under the horizon. Everywhere looked so possible from out at sea. You could feel the whole ship quickening at the first sight of it: the little gangs of ratings out on the flight deck in the cold, the bridge filling, the funny hush as everyone strained to pick out a fresh detail invisible to his neighbour. Landfall was like a child’s Christmas — you woke up in the dark for it, alert after only an hour or two of sleep, and its slowly sharpening silhouette held out exactly the same kind of promise as the tantalizing bulges in the stocking at the end of the bed. Never mind for now that all the most exciting protuberances would turn out, in daylight, to be potatoes.

Hours before you were due to dock, before land was more than a hypothetical smudge, everyone was busy, borrowing sharp ties, fancy cufflinks, ten bob notes and names of bars where you could meet girls. Even the captain, arriving on the bridge rather too early to take over the wheel, failed to mask the foolish landfall smile that suddenly knocked ten years off his age.

George had first seen Montedor like this, in ’45, twenty years before he’d taken over from old Miller at the bunkering station. There was the smell of the African wind in the muggy dawn, and Hecla’s corkscrew motion as she waddled through a steep beam sea. The dusty cone of Mount Bobia was what you saw first — a lonely island, its top lost in cloud. Then the sky thickened behind it and turned into the sawtooth outline of the Sierra de la Canjombe.

Farley was standing beside him, elbows splayed on the rail, his face sunk in his hands. They watched together as the coast inched towards them and you could see the rim of surf breaking against an impossibly bright yellow beach. Farley passed George the binoculars, and eventually came out with what was on his miserable mind.

“All those nigger tarts … I suppose they’ve all got clap?”

“And syph,” George said. He was staring at the lighthouse on the end of Cabo Sao Giorgio. It didn’t look like a lighthouse at all: with its crucifix and slender spire it looked like a whitewashed Mediterranean Catholic church.

Devon now was just as foreign-looking as Montedor then: a bald, brown, humpbacked land, like a single lichenous rock in the middle of the sea. There were no signs of life out there, no evidence of natives, friendly or otherwise; just a rolling vegetable bareness, on which you might find yourself cast away like Robinson Crusoe. The waves were tamer here now that the boat was in the lee of the coast: six miles offshore, George was able to hand the wheel over to Lazy Mike and go out on deck to take a closer look at the country he’d discovered.

He stood on the coachroof in the warm red shadow of the mainsail, one arm locked round the mast, the other trying to keep the binoculars aimed at Devon. Mostly all they showed was blinding sky, then the torn lacework of the sea, as Calliope’s bows splashed down after another flying leap. But it was bloody marvellous, though. George had spray in his eyes and up his nose. The chest of his jersey was soaked through. He had to keep on using his binocular-hand to jam down the brim of his Holsum cap and stop it being blown away to France. Eventually he gave up on the binoculars and hung them round his neck. Giving himself to the powerful sweep and plummet of the foredeck, he let the land ahead come to him in its own good time.

Yes. There was a fan-shaped spill of colour in the dark cleft of a hillside over to the north-east, like a mess of dried paint on a palette with its shocking pinks and chlorophyll greens. George warmed to the sight of it. He loved those feckless shanty towns where people lived in cardboard boxes, old banana crates, kerosene drums, palm thatch and chickenwire. They kept starved goats and grew amazing flowers in dried milk tins. Ten minutes more, and one would catch the first whiff of their cooking fires, and see the women at the water’s edge, pinning out the laundry with stones to dry on the sand. Yes. Now he could smell the fires. Definitely. Woodsmoke. Burned palm oil. Dung. Coriander.

Calliope slammed into a breaking wave and George got a bucketful of sea in his face. He wiped his eyes with a sodden sleeve. When he looked up to find his shanty town again, it wasn’t there. Not that it made a damn of difference, really, that the shacks of the detribalized Wolofs were actually just holiday caravans. The basic principle and the colours were exactly the same. But it was funny about the smell. That had been as tangible as the salt water which was still stinging in his eyes.

He clambered back along the wet deck to the wheelhouse, where he reset the compass course on the autopilot. 125° would keep the boat prowling nicely south-eastwards in parallel with the coast. He loosened the sheets in the cockpit. With the wind behind her now, Calliope was freewheeling: she lolloped quietly along with the waves, taking the sea with an easy slouch.

George trained the binoculars on the shore. The sandstone cliffs swam, enlarged and slightly out of focus, in the glass. What he wanted was a church tower, or a gasholder, or a radio mast, or what the Admiralty chart called a Hotel (conspic) . But the place was empty of landmarks. There was nothing to get a fix on in the blue shadows of its volcanic pleats and folds, its tufty trees, its wide heathlands of gorse and bracken, its pretty tumble of caravans on the hill. The land slid past at a steady four knots on the stream. George watched intently, trying to second-guess it, like an immigrant at a porthole looking anxiously out at his strange home.

There was a voice at his shoulder.

“There will be Kurds there, won’t there, darling? I’m simply dying to see the Kurds, aren’t you?”

He’d felt a blaze of relief and gratitude to Angela for the sweet way in which she’d said yes to the Aden job. He had expected tears, recriminations, icy silences, had steeled himself to be told that he was utterly insensitive, thoughtless and unkind. The marriage was fifteen months old and Angela was pregnant. George knew that Aden was too much to ask of her, even though the job did pay an amazing £1250 a year. He had put it to her so hesitantly that he was dismissing it from his own mind as he spoke. Yet she said yes. No questions. Just like that. It was a day or two later that he found out that Angela’s consent was based on the fond illusion (and George loved her for it) that Aden was the homeland of the Kurds.

After his demob., it seemed to him that he was the only person around who didn’t have a strong opinion about what George should do in civvy street. Angela had lots. “Georgie can be one of those men who go round the world collecting old carriage clocks for millionaires,” she announced at breakfast at the Haighs’. On successive days, she advised him to go in for theatrical management, estate agency, trick photography and the Bar. Finally she suggested that he might find work as a spy.

“Darling — how on earth do you think one’s supposed to become a spy, for heaven’s sake?”

“Well, you’d have to go and see someone in the Foreign Office, I should think,” she said, smoking a de Reszke cigarette and looking perfectly serious.

George’s father held out altogether gloomier prospects for his future. “I don’t know if you’ve thought of schoolteaching, old boy? You might just manage to get into that. Of course there’d be two years of college first, but I rather think you might be able to get one of those grants that they seem to be giving away to pretty well everybody now, under the Socialists.” He blew noisily through the dottle in his pipe. “The Whitaker boy, now … what’shisname?”