Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“That’s it! Easy now— easy! ” He was shouting. “We’re fine. Careful … nicely! Watch this one — yes! And round we go, come on — come on! There you are!”

The Race was there — over to seaward, an amazing tumble of white, caught for a half-second in the lighthouse beam. The sea was standing up on end, in blocklike pyramids, and it was growling at him. George could hear it over the noise of the engine, a continuous, bass, thunder of water against water. It seemed impossible that the sea could ever make a sound like that, it was so deep, so ripe with animal malevolence, the sort of sound that you expected to hear only in bad dreams.

Calliope skidded sideways and made for the breakers. He wrenched her back on course. Between the Race and the lighthouse there was — not the “smooth passage” of the pilot book, but a gap of black, corrugated, roiling water, the width of a city street. Spinning the spokes of the wheel, hearing the chains grumble, he threaded the boat into the gap, and held on tight as she see-sawed her way through in a caul of spray. The short steep waves felt rock-like; the frames of the boat jarred each time she struck. George was as afraid of running on to the beach as he was of being sucked into the Race: the sand was at his elbow, flying by. In the Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash of the beam, he saw a notice saying NO BATHING zip past the rail to port — and a stranded motor tyre — and a bucket — and someone’s shoe.

“Yes!” he said. “Yes! Yes! We’re almost there! Now, watch it, will you! Easy … easy. Beautiful. You see? It’s tailing off now. The land’s slowed down. We’re well past the bad bit. Don’t you think?”

Through the open wheelhouse door he could hear the growl of the Race coming from astern now, and the lighthouse was throwing the boat’s shadow ahead of her on the water. He drank from the bottle. Whisky splashed on his throat; he had whisky in his beard. He had some trouble in screwing the cap back on, his hands shook so much. But it was a happy fever. George said, “Did you ever see anything like that before? Christ, but that was bloody magnificent — wasn’t it?”

He still had the shakes when he turned into Weymouth and slipped under the banked lights of the Sealink ferries on their moorings. He was shaky when he stepped on to the quay with his ropes. He crouched under a streetlamp, doing and undoing a bowline knot that wouldn’t come out right. Finally he had to recite, “Over and under and over and round and over and under and through” a raw cadet again.

A sweetshop and tobacconist’s was open on the quay. George stood in a daze in front of the coloured chocolate bars. Full of the sea, he had lost the words you needed for the shore. He said, “ … writing paper — have you?”

“No, all we’ve got is the cards,” the man said, making no sense at all. He pointed at a carousel of views of Weymouth, tit-and-bum blondes, kittens, drunkards and naked children on lavatories.

On one card, a young man was dragging a girl upstairs. He was carrying a carton of ice cream. The captain said, Quick, dear, before it gets soft! George had a few moments’ difficulty in working out the joke. When he got it, he stood in front of the carousel, wagging his head slowly from side to side.

He said: “No paper at all?”

“Only wrapping paper.”

“I suppose these’ll have to do, then.” He shovelled the cards out of the stand in handfuls. Cards spilled round his feet. The shopman gathered them up and put them in a bag for him.

“You must have a big family,” the man said.

“No. Just one daughter.”

He carried his cards to the bistro along the quay. His stall was poorly lit by a candle on top of a frozen fountain of wax. George asked for a carafe of white wine, spread the first five cards in a row on the red-checkered tablecloth, and settled down to write.

The peace summit, the car workers’ strike and the two per cent rise in the mortgage rate were elbowed out of the radio news by the gale. In Wiltshire, a motorcyclist was squashed by a falling tree; he was taken to hospital but found to be dead on arrival. The Severn Bridge was closed to traffic. In Gloucester a whirlwind removed the roofs of three homes on a council estate. A Fleetwood trawler was missing, presumed lost, in the Irish Sea. Two warships collided in Plymouth Sound; the cost of the damage sustained was estimated to be in excess of £l.6m. Ferry services to the Continent were suspended, though a spokesman from the British Airports Authority stated that flights from Heathrow were operating normally. An elderly woman died in Northampton when her garden shed collapsed in winds of speeds said by the Meteorological Office to be more than 80mph. Power cables were down in many areas, and flooding was reported in places as far apart as Peeblesshire and Dartford, Kent. Late news just in announced that all train services in and out of Liverpool Street were severely disrupted and passengers should expect long delays.

27th March. 0925. Sea Area Thames. Wind SW, Severe Gale 9 to Storm 10. Rain squalls. Visibility poor. Bar. 967mb., falling more slowly .

To begin with, Sheila had taken the cards for some sort of awful schoolboy joke. The first to arrive had been Weymouth Pier, although it was numbered 4 in a scrawled circle on its top left-hand corner. It was followed in the next post by Go on, Dick — the further you’re in the nicer it feels! (11) and We can’t have that dangling — it’ll have to come off! (17). Number 1 (a view of Lulworth Cove) came the next morning, along with six more, including All Henry wants to do is stay home every night and play with my pussy! (13), a donkey in a straw hat (3) and Look at my husband making his little what-not stand! (24). This last was the only one that was signed. It ended: “Good night, Sheila. I love you. Daddy.”

The words made her want to scream.

By lunchtime on the second day of the deluge, she could no longer bear to pick up the mail herself. She heard the soft riffle of letters through the flap in the front door as a violation. She sent Tom to get them.

“How many?”

“ … three … four … five,” Tom said, handing her another sheaf of seaside smut.

She read:

9 healing process. So much is beginning to add up. Things that I thought were gone long ago have come back. I feel very close to you — even, in a curious way, close to your mother. It’s a bit late in the day now to claim that I’ve begun, at least, to understand what happened between all of us, but one does see

She turned the card over. It said: Brr! I’ll be glad to get something warm inside me!

“It’s revenge,” Sheila said. “He hates me.”

Tom said: “This one’s all about some bloke from Pwllheli.”

Sheila started to laugh. “Oh, God. The world’s going to be saved by a man from Pwllheli—” But she choked on her laughter and found tears in her eyes.

As the cards arrived, she tried arranging them in order, front side up, to see if there was some vindictive pattern in their pictures or their captions, but they made no sense at all, except that they seemed to get progressively dirtier.

It took four days and seven posts to fill in all the gaps in the series. On the fourth day came the news of the gales, and Sheila’s fury with her father dissolved into helpless anxiety. She kept the radio on in her study. At each hourly news bulletin, she expected to hear something terrible. She kept on going to the lavatory next door and being sick. After the eleven o’clock news she found Tom holding her head as she spat a trickle of yellow vomit into the bowl. Grateful for his hands as they gentled her, she cried — coughing, laughing, coughing again.