Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Sheila said: “I saw a boy fall off that ship. He was drowned.”

“No he wasn’t. He just went on swimming under the water and turned into a sealion.”

“You’re so silly, Daddy. You’re too silly for words!”

“Don’t sit up on the edge like that, darling — you’ll fall in.”

“I’ll turn into a sealion.”

“Oh, no, you won’t—”

“Oh, yes, I will!”

Sheila kept him company until he was alongside Calliope . He climbed aboard lightly, swinging himself over the rail with a young man’s easy stride, and hauled the dinghy in after him. Down below, waiting for his breakfast coffee to reheat on the stove, George found himself explaining that there wasn’t really enough wind to sail by, but that the barometer looked steady and, once in Lyme Bay, the tides would be slack and they should make Lyme itself before it got dark.

“What do you think?”

“You’re the big enchilada, baby.” Teddy said, loosely sprawled on the starboard settee berth sucking Sun Top through a straw. He raised himself on one elbow and looked incuriously at Dartmouth through a porthole. “What is this joint, anyway?”

“You’d hate it,” George said.

“Looks like too much of a marshmallow town for me.”

“That’s the trouble. They’re all marshmallow towns round here.”

“Well, if you’ve got the ants, let’s burn rubber.” He sank back on the cushions and noisily sucked at the last of his drink.

By eleven o’clock George had winched the anchor up and was under way, with Calliope ploughing at half speed ahead through a misty drizzle so fine that one couldn’t tell it was raining except for the softened edges of the castles and the woodlands at the mouth of the estuary. The velvety water ahead gradually faded in colour until it was all of a piece with the mother-of-pearl sky.

He set a southwesterly course on the autopilot to skirt Castle Ledge and the jagged, gullshitty island of Mew Stone, and whistled a few bars of “Tiger Rag”, thinking it might help to raise a breeze. But the tell-tale ribbons on the shrouds didn’t stir, and the only movement of the sea was a flaccid bulge of swell left over from yesterday.

It took half an hour to lose the land astern. As soon as it was safely out of sight, George eased the boat round northwards on a course of 041°. Five miles off Berry Head, according to his dead reckoning, the drizzle petered out and the ribbons on the shrouds began to ripple in an idle, offhand sort of way. In the cockpit, he sucked on his forefinger and raised it high to test the air. There wasn’t a wind, exactly; more an atmospheric restlessness, a faint snuffling from somewhere away to the south-east. When he hoisted the sails, they hung in creases from the masts. He stopped the engine and whistled “The Miller of Dee”.

Calliope seemed not to be moving at all, but the rudder was leaving a trickling eddy of water behind it; and when George flipped a matchbox over the bow and paced it down the deck as it bobbed along the boat’s side, he counted eleven seconds before it passed the stern. About one knot, he reckoned, thinking of the Queen Adelaide and the passage to Aden.

The Dunnetts had left a mackerel line in the tool locker, a lurid contraption of lead weights and bright feathers which George lowered over the side: at least he could frighten the fish if he couldn’t catch them. He sat in the cockpit, tweaking the line with his fingers and getting no bites.

“Come on, fish—” He could feel the deep thrum of the weights in the water like an electrical current. “Send me a signal and state your position.”

“Why are you talking to the fish, Daddy?”

“Because there’s nothing fish like more than a little polite conversation. The little fishes of the sea, They sent an answer back to me. The little fishes’ answer was, We cannot do it, Sir, because-”

“They didn’t.”

“Yes they did, honour bright. And there was a man once who used to charm the fish by playing his flute to them on a pond.”

He let Sheila hold the line. She gripped it tightly, showing the whites of her knuckles as if she expected imminent contact with a shark. She said “Hello, fish!” in an experimental voice and giggled.

“That’s the way. You know, the biggest treat for a fish, what he likes best in all the world, is to hear the seven times table spoken very clearly with no urns and ers.”

The boat flopped about in the swell. Water gurgled in the tanks; the booms of the sails creaked and slammed. A man could live for a long time like this, out of the way of things, offshore, beyond the reach of the snags and troubles of the land. You wouldn’t need much — enough wind to keep you out of the doldrums, a sextant, a supply of fish hooks, a good clock …

“Seven fours are twenty-eight, seven fives are thirty-five,” Sheila sang out in her pipsqueak voice.

George’s crooked smile disclosed a single tooth, stained yellow with tobacco. He was Noah, seeing the last mountain-top go under, with the ark riding clear on the flood. There was a lot to be said for the idea of carrying the world away in a gopherwood shell. George leaned back in the cockpit and pulled the long brim of his cap over his eyes. (It had shed two more letters.)

“Seven sevens are forty-nine, seven eights are fifty-six—”

He scratched at an itch in his beard, thinking of his crew, his family. Diana was there, and Sheila, of course. Teddy and Vera were guests; and for the first time George found himself not minding that there were jokes between those two that he missed. At dinner in the saloon, they crowded round the little table, all talking at once, as families did. He looked from lamplit face to lamplit face. He topped up Teddy’s glass and caught Diana’s private smile. They were safe with him, all of them. He plotted their course, kept the sails trimmed and the log up to date. He was their pilot, shepherd, paterfamilias. Though quite how the sleeping arrangements worked out, George wasn’t sure.

“Seven elevens are seventy — I’ve got one! I’ve got one! Look, Daddy, I’ve got one!”

And she had. The fish showed in the water as a scoop of silver and came tumbling over the gunwale — a lightning bolt on the end of a piece of string. It thrashed on the duckboards, shedding lilac scales like coins. George killed it quickly with a winch handle. In seconds, the expression of astonished accusation in its eye began to fade. He watched as its scales dulled and its skin wrinkled. It was a sorry sort of fish, out of condition, its head far too big for its body.

Cleaning it in a bucket of seawater was an act of penance. He cut off its head and pulled out its intestines with his fingers. Sheila said “Yuck” and squeezed her eyes tight shut when he chucked the bloody water over the side.

There was nothing in sight — no boats, no land. George went below and grilled the mackerel for his lunch. He couldn’t finish it: its too-white flesh tasted vaguely of soap flakes. Later, he hid the fishing line in the back of the tool locker. He didn’t want to kill any more things. That wasn’t what an ark was for.

At Lyme Regis Calliope lay against the breakwater just inside the harbour entrance, where she dried out at low tide. Beached, out of her element, she looked enormous, more ship than boat. George stood underneath her, gumbooted, scrubbing the slime and barnacles off her great ribbed belly with a broom. Fiddler crabs scuttled between his feet. Lulled by the rhythmical scratch of the brush on the wood, he found himself laughing aloud because all he could think of was Lady Standing’s Rejuvenating Cream For Tired Faces And Hands.