Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

The mizzen sheet was looking badly frayed around the running blocks where it was fastened to the boom. George walked into the town to replace it, taking the beach route where shallow ledges of grey rock shelved down into the sea. He jumped from ledge to ledge, breathing Vera’s way, and arrived at a crevasse too wide to jump, where a tongue of sea ran in, making a deep anemone pool. The surface of the rock on which he stood was lightly scrolled with a spiral pattern as big as a dinner plate.

His father tapped it with the handle of his prawn net.

“Ammonite,” George said.

“Period?”

“Jurassic.”

“After the Jura mountains. In France, old boy,” his father said. George watched his mother, walking on ahead. Though there was no wind, she was pushing at her skirt to stop it blowing up above her knees.

In Lyme he found a yacht chandler’s called Midships. He stood browsing among the cardboard drums of rope, looking for one of the right thickness to fit the block on the boom.

“Yes. Can I help you?” He was a fat man in a guernsey with Midships embroidered in red across the chest. George spotted him immediately.

“Marsland!”

“Yes—”

Poor Marsland. He’d lost all his hair since his Pwllheli days and his gums had shrunk away from his teeth. On the profit side, he had gained a vast drinker’s gut and a pair of gold-rimmed half-moon specs. Taken all round, Marsland showed a pretty disastrous net loss.

“Grey,” George said. “Remember? Pwllheli. We were on the same course.”

“Good heavens. Were we?” He peered at George, first over the tops of his lenses and then through the bottoms. He didn’t seem very pleased with what he saw.

“I didn’t have the beard then,” George said, doing his best to help.

“A lot of chaps on the course …” Marsland seemed to be taking a particular interest in George’s hair, as if he suspected George of concealing his own baldness under a wig. “No, you don’t stand out at all in my mind, I’m afraid.”

Offended, George said, “I knew who you were as soon as I saw you.”

“Yes,” Marsland said suspiciously. “Pwllheli.” He was, George noticed, trying to hold his stomach in. He pointed to his chest. “You see I’ve still kept the old handle.”

“Sorry?”

“Midships. You know. If you were on the course. You all used to call me ‘Midships’ … and it sort of … stuck. Midships Marsland. I think it all actually started with my steering the longboat … couldn’t keep it straight … some silly thing …”

This was most peculiar. They’d never called Marsland Midships. Midships was a man named Peters, who had indeed been famous for his zig-zag courses. Why on earth should Marsland want to hijack someone else’s nickname? The cadet whom George knew was a colourless public schoolboy who seemed totally careless of his impact on other people. Not that the impact had been much: he was someone whom no-one would remember unless they actually saw him. Yet all that time Marsland must have been aching for the kind of popularity that went with a nickname, to the point where he’d finally been driven to stealing another man’s.

“Ah, yes,” George said. “Of course. Midships.”

“I don’t think we called you anything, did we?” Marsland said, with bulging complacency.

“No. Grey by name and grey by nature, I’m afraid.”

“Didn’t think so.”

George bought ten metres of rope for his new mizzen sheet. Marsland cut it with an electric gadget that melted the strands into a hard plastic knob at the end. George said: “Remember old Prynne?”

“Prynne? No, I don’t think so. Was he one of us?”

Paying at the till, George answered Marsland’s question about what he was doing in Lyme Regis.

Marsland said: “Sounds too bloody lonely by half.”

“No — I don’t find it lonely at all.”

“What, you mean, with all the piss-ups ashore and so forth?”

George didn’t try to put the man right. As he left the shop, ducking between racks of jerseys, captains’ hats and yellow stormgear, he heard Marsland call, “Good old Pwllheli!”

He waited for the sea, watching it inch over the sand beyond the harbour mouth. His timing was going to be too fine for comfort. According to the almanac, the tide would begin to sweep east round Portland Bill at 1600, but High Water at Lyme was not until 1708. If Calliope floated at half-tide, say 1400 hours, he wouldn’t make Portland much before 1800 or even later. The longer he waited, the darker and fiercer would be his passage round the Bill. He leaned over the stern rail: a trickle of dun-coloured water was nudging a sodden cigarette pack along the dry bottom.

At 1400 Calliope was still leaning against the wall, her squashed fenders as hard as lumps of concrete. At 1415 George, sitting in the saloon, felt the boat shift a few inches and heard the fenders sigh. It wasn’t until 1440 that she floated free and he was able to rid her of the cat’s cradle of ropes that tied her to Lyme Regis. Going astern, he held his breath, expecting the keel to grind on sand at any moment, but she slid past the pier head without touching and he brought her round and pointed her at Portland Bill, on a course of 134°.

Sails were useless in the strengthening headwind from the southeast. The boat lumbered on under engine, bucking the sullen, spitting little waves. It was cold and sunless. George watched the wind anxiously. The shipping forecast had said it would be Force 3 to 4. This felt like 4, a rather solid and intimidating 4, at that. No problem here, but round the Bill it would blow straight into the tide and raise a tricky sea. He was tempted to put back into Lyme but was deterred by the prospect of sharing the same town as Marsland. At 1700 the wind lost its heart and drifted round into the east. The tops of the waves stopped breaking and turned to milky green spun glass.

It was twilight before the boat was running in the lee of Chesil Beach. The unearthly level straightness of its piled shingle looked as bleak as a line in a ledger. Nothing seemed to grow on it. He could see no people. Even the sea, sucking along its edge, seemed repelled by it. It had the comfortlessness of a cold outpost of Sahara; though the Sahara, George thought, at least had some curves to its name. There were no curves on Chesil Beach. For more than a mile in front, and many miles behind, it stretched away, ruled and rigid, as unfriendly a coast as George had ever seen.

He had brought the bottle of Chivas Regal up into the wheelhouse to help him get round Portland Bill. He filled his pipe and set it beside the wheel.

He saw the beach quicken as the tide got Calliope in its grip. He steered in as close as he dared to the speeding shingle and watched the lighthouse ahead. Every twenty seconds four rapid powerful flashes lit the water and showed it as a rumpled black oilskin. In the long interval between the flashes, George was blind. The compass light shone like a pinprick on the floating card. Each time the lighthouse flashed, he checked the bearing of the boat against the shore and clung to the number. 180°. 184°. 177°. The ragged, shadowy edge of the Bill was slithering past, fifty yards off, and he could see the tide heaping up against its low cliffs in the strobelike pulses of the turning light, as high above him now as the moon. 174°. 171°. 165°. Calliope shot round the point, stumbling and sliding in the fast water. Her steering kept on going suddenly slack as if the chains had fallen out of connection with the rudder. Caught in an eddy, she lurched, lost her heading, and George found himself pointed straight at the shore. He hauled her round again, fighting the current.