Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

A little after nine o’clock, the tide turned again. The lights of the town began to slide slowly past the portholes, then reappeared on the starboard side as the boat swung on her anchor to face the sea. Dartmouth went into a spin; George placidly washed up his dinner things. He was thinking of Fisherman’s Bay, of Sheila wriggling in his arms in the sea, her ribcage as raw-boned as a whippet’s. The Indian Ocean rolled in, veined and green. The curling tops of the breakers caught the sun as they exploded into flashpowder.

“Here’s Arthur!” George shouted over the magnificent gravelly roaring of the surf, and Sheila squealed with joy as he lifted her up over his head, the water peeling off her in shivers of white light.

He pumped the bilges out, checked the riding lamp in the mizzen shrouds, and slept in the forecabin, a sleep void of dreams. Twice in the night he came close to the surface like a lazily rising fish, heard the companionable mutter of the river close by his ear, and sank again.

He was awake early. There was no wind. The water looked like tarnished foil under a washcloth sky. After breakfast, he busied himself with pleasant, shipshusbandly jobs. He polished the brasswork in the wheelhouse; he lowered a galvanized bucket on the end of a rope into the river and sluiced down the decks. Breathing heavily, he leaned on the main boom and blew up the inflatable dinghy with the foot pump. The rubbery fabric swelled round him into an undignified craft like a grey chipolata sausage, which George launched over the rail with a splash.

He needed money. His bank now was up forward in the chain locker, in a Huntley & Palmer’s biscuit tin. What was left of the cash that he’d brought back from Geneva was stored there, in wads as stiff as decks of cards. He hadn’t bothered to clean the tin out first, and it still held a few remains of a fruit cake which his mother must have baked ten years ago, at least. The money smelled of almonds. George pared away a fifty pound note from the front of a pack with his thumb, and hid the tin under a coiled heap of rusty chain.

He made a slow, crabwise passage across the river in the dinghy, fighting the drift of the current and the ebb tide. Every time he looked over his shoulder, Dartmouth seemed to have receded a little further. Struggling to keep his place on the stream, he paddled as hard as he could through the fish crates, logs, old light bulbs, plastic bottles and soft drink cans. A torn car seat sailed past; a vacant pair of oilskin trousers was going cruising in company with a distended pink polythene bag. As soon as George let his oars rest for a moment, the dinghy became part of this glacial seaward trail of garbage. Seeing his own ragged plimsolls, their eyelets gone, their lace-ends turned to feathery catkins, he wished that he’d taken time off to trim his beard: when last observed it had put him squarely in the flotsam class.

He reached the quayside, tied the dinghy to a ladder, and scrambled up and over the wall into the street. The pavement felt like a trampoline. His first attempt at walking made him landsick, so he held on to a lamp-post, where he was given a wide berth by the morning shoppers. When he got going again, he planted his feet wide and leaned to outwit the land as it rose on the beam.

Crossing the road he was half-deafened by the long contemptuous blast of a motorist’s horn. He skipped painfully clear of a scowling radiator grille. Ahead of him, a cyclist swerved, then turned to shout at George as soon as he had ridden past. People on the pavement stopped and stared as he leaped and stumbled through to the far shore. He turned back on his persecutors and remembered that cars in England always did drive on the left-hand side.

He tried to lose himself in the crowd but his wet plimsolls, flapping in the dust, left a spoor of footprints like the track of an unsteady seal. Still rolling slightly, he collided with a boy with orange hair that stuck up from his scalp in foot high spikes. “I am most frightfully sorry,” George said; and the boy smiled back as if he and George were members of the same threatened tribe.

He found a temporary anchorage in a corner shop selling newspapers and groceries. He took his place in the queue of women at the counter and practised the deep breathing exercise that Vera claimed was good for his heart. You had to close your eyes and imagine that you were a deep well. In a mountain, Vera said.

“No sun today. There’s a strike on.”

“Give us a mirror and a star, then.”

George opened his eyes again. The headlines of the day’s papers were arranged on the counter like a crossword. He read IAN TELLS ARTHUR: GET STUFFED and NO DIVORCE FOR DEIRDRE AND KEN. He closed his eyes and let the voices in the shop wash over him.

“Awlid haretna, al-liss wal kilab.”

“Ne bith him to hearpan hyge.”

“Ik kan alleen nog regels schrijva.”

“Ta ta, dear.”

“Ne to hringthege, ne to wife wyn.”

“Niebo i pieklo!”

“Ne to worulde hyht. Ta ta, josy.”

“Ta ta. Yuspliz?”

“Oh … sorry,” George said. “I wonder,” he spoke with care, mouthing his words, “if you have such a thing as a pint of milk?”

He bought milk, eggs and a tin of steak and kidney pudding. He paid with the fifty-pound note, which the woman accepted with a sigh and a glare. “I’m afraid I’ve nothing smaller.” The woman stood at the till, sniffing with annoyance and making a stolid pantomime of the business of counting out his change. Speaking to someone behind him, she tipped her head in George’s direction. “The season’s starting early this year, it looks like. There you are, Monsewer!” she shouted at George; “Forty-eight pounds and sixty-two pee! And Bon-Jewer to you!”

“I’m not deaf, you know,” George said, stuffing the soggy tangle of notes into his trouser pocket. As he let himself out of the shop he heard the word “Tourists!”—a term of abuse ripe enough to comprehend a man like him in his entirety.

When he climbed down the ladder to the dinghy, holding his bag of things between his teeth, he found Sheila waiting for him. Lost inside the padded bulk of her gorse yellow Junior Crewsaver, she looked famished and skinny, an Oxfam child. Her face was as brown as an Arab’s.

Sheila sat up on the stern of the boat, trailing her fingers in the water as George rowed away from the wall. He fussed over her. “Do sit more in, darling. Yes, like that. And keep a hold on the rope there. We don’t want you going overboard.”

“I can swim,” Sheila said. “I can swim eighteen strokes.”

“Yes, darling, but the water’s very cold here at this time of year. It’s not warm enough for swimming.”

“I can swim further than Tory Wilshawe.”

They drifted out on to the waxy surface of the open river.

The tide was on the turn now, and the going was easy. George stopped the dinghy so that Sheila could exchange pleasantries with a pair of swans. He paddled her close under the side of the sail training ship, and they watched the children there, swarming high up in the yards, while a man with a megaphone jollied them along from down on deck. Sheila squinched up her eyes and made a face. “They’ll fall,” she said.

“They’ve all got harnesses on. They’re safer than they look.”

Squiring her on the water, the proprietor of all she saw, George gave Sheila the whole of Dartmouth as an enormous present: the Naval College on the hill, the car ferry trundling across the river on its chains, the big crabber manoeuvring in midstream, the yachts and rainbow sailboards, the old cream and chocolate steam train whoop-whooping out of the woods on the Kingswear shore.