Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“Oh Christ,” George said, shaking his head to try and bring the world back in focus. “Was it terrible? Were you awfully frightened, darling?”

Angela smiled. She looked as if she found it difficult to make her lips move properly. And suddenly the room was full of bachelors. Tony Flower was the first to kiss her, and the bachelors were doing and saying all the things to Angela that George couldn’t do or say for love of her.

“Angie — you clever girl!”

“Isn’t she stunning!”

“She’s got Angie’s eyes!”

“I never knew you had it in you,” Justin Quayle said, staring lugubriously at the baby, and everyone, even Angela laughed. Suddenly bright, she said: “Oh, Bill — you shouldn’t have. Look— shampoo!”

The tide had turned against him. The water in the English Channel was drifting westwards now, back to the Atlantic. For the most part, it was moving sluggishly at a knot or so; but where Start Point stuck out into the stream like a crooked forefinger, the tide raced past the land, as fast as a river in flood. Even with the engine on, Calliope was making hardly any headway over the ground. The lighthouse, standing on its own island of black shadowed rock, remained firmly stuck a mile off on the port bow, though the sea swept by in a wash of foam, and the boat’s wake trailed behind her in a broad V of curling water. It was bloody strange — as if reality had torn in half, and the two sides of the picture refused to match. When he looked at the sea, he was creaming along at top speed. But when he looked across at the land, he was as fixed as a navigation buoy, tethered to the seafloor on a chain and bucking fretfully on the tide. Sometimes the sea won, sometimes the land, and every time George looked, he knew that what his eyes told him was untrue.

He couldn’t rid his mouth of the carbony, acidic taste of the champagne.

Peter Moffatt said, “Well, here’s to Angie and Sheila — and George, of course”, and the baby in Angela’s arms began to cry, like a single, thin, monotonous note on the top of the scale on a harmonica. The sound deepened and grew louder, the wizened face filled out and turned into George’s own baby, up on the bridge aboard Hecla .

“She wants her milk … doesn’t she?” George said.

In full view of the bachelors, Angela exposed her nipple with its mysterious circlet of fair hair. The baby sucked, as sure of itself as a sea anemone fastening on an extended fingertip. The bachelors, silent in the presence of a sacrament, studied the turning fan over the bed. George watched. His eyes pricked with love and pride and hope. It was the only time that Angela ever let him see her suckling their baby; and Sheila was weaned at fourteen days.

It took an hour to round the lighthouse, with the wind dying away and the cliffs casting a widening pool of cold shadow over the sea. Calliope , straining against the surge of tide, inched past, her sails slatting uselessly, her engine drumming under George’s feet. Hunting for slack water close inshore, he steered the boat frighteningly near to the rocks. There was no slack water. The sea raced past the drying ledges, looking as smooth and thick as black treacle.

Beyond the lighthouse, the horizon was oddly lumpy and there were breakers ahead. Scared of running aground on a shoal, George checked with the chart and saw immediately what the trouble was. The tide, sweeping south and east, rode slap bang over a shallow hill of sand, where it crumpled and broke up. He tried to skirt the tangled water of the race, but was caught in the edge of it. Calliope was shoved and jostled by houndstooth waves that sprang up out of nowhere. Zigzags of foamy water, like the tracks of giant fish, charged at the boat. The steering went slack as she skidded on the lip of a yawning eddy. Down below, something heavy was sliding across the floor of the saloon. A wave like a waterspout threw Calliope on her side for a second, and George feared for the rigging as the boom of the slack mainsail crashed into the shrouds.

“And hands that do dishes …” Wedged in tight, he hung on to the wheel and saw the sky slide up from under his feet. The propeller screeched as a rogue wave lifted it clear of the water and made it grind on air. The wheelhouse windows streamed.

“Will be soft as your face …” Yawing and slamming her way through the last of the rough stuff, the boat carried him into the frozen calm of Start Bay, where he found that he was still bellowing that damned jingle out loud and the blood was foaming in his veins like the sea.

He went out on deck to get the sails down. Between the boat and the shore, the twilit water had the metallic iridescence of a pool of mercury. It was joined to Devonshire by a fine seam of wet sand. At the edge of the sea, the land was a long low strip of grassy dunes and straggling villages: from half a mile off it was as remote as a little world inside a blown glass paperweight. At Hall Sands there were anglers under green umbrellas; at Tor Cross, a matchstick man was throwing driftwood for his capering dog. One after another, lights came on in bungalows and squat mock Tudor villas: George, bundling the cold canvas in his arms, watched. It was the time for tea and sponge cakes and the electric-coloured yatter of children’s TV. The tips of his fingers were white and numb as he lashed the sail to the boom. He liked the feeling of being out at sea in the dark, unnoticed, looking in. When he went back to the wheelhouse he was smiling in his beard, as if the villages were a pretty invention that he’d just made up.

There was no making out the daymark above the entrance to the River Dart. He motored cautiously north through the still water towards a mountainous wall of matt black. A Naval College launch full of cadets cut across his bows. Then he was overtaken by a returning crabber, her stern deck blindingly floodlit, seagulls jostling in her wake like bats. George could hear the sea sucking on rocks worryingly close at hand.

Shielding his eyes from the lights of the trawler, he searched the darkness over on the port side and found the lazy red flash of Kingswear Main Light inside the estuary. He kept on course and waited for the red flash to turn to white. Red. Red. Red. Red. Red. Calliope seemed to be right under the cliff ahead before the white sector showed and he swung the boat to home in on the beam. The wooded land closed round him like fur. He squeezed between the turretted silhouettes of a pair of storybook castles, and there was Dartmouth — a carnival of lights on the water, a good party to gatecrash.

Even so, he was choosy about the company he kept. He left the regimented alloy forest of a yacht marina well to starboard, not wanting the magic of the evening to be spoiled by a lot of bloody yachtsmen. He dodged a ferry, slipped under the stern of an antique brigantine moored in the fairway, and came up in an uncrowded reach of inky water on the Kingswear side of the river. Working by torchlight, he dropped his hook and saw the heavy anchor wink deep down like a turning fish as the chain rattled over the bow.

He lit the paraffin lamps and tidied up the wreckage in the saloon. It wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d feared: two plates were broken; Conrad, Kipling, P. G. Wodehouse and Reed’s Nautical Almanac were tangled up together on the floor; the transistor radio had come unstowed and its casing was cracked, but when George switched it on a woman was reading the usual news. He got the charcoal stove going, poured himself half a tumblerful of Chivas Regal and laid out food in tins. Vera watched him from her photograph on the bulkhead.