Jonathan Raban: Foreign Land: A Novel

The theory worked with people, too. Think of the Israelites in the Bible, when they were in Egypt. The wrong place. When Moses started marching them across the Red Sea to the promised land, he was taking a trader’s risk. What were they worth in Egypt, under the old pharaohs? Sod all. What were they worth in the promised land? Look at the Rothschilds.

An exit sign to Camberley went by. He was thinking of Sheila’s dad. He was in the wrong place, all right. In Africa, with the baobab trees, you could have put a value on him. But not in England. He was like pews going to rot in Battersea, or coals heaped up, unshipped, in Newcastle. Travelling round in his boat sending postcards, he was like one of those cargoes that get hawked about from port to port with no likely buyers. You’d need to put some hard thought into working out the right place for Sheila’s dad; one thing was certain, as far as Tom was concerned, and Sheila too, really — it wasn’t Clapham.

Still, there was plenty of time to divine that. So long as he was out of the house before Tom’s daughter was born. Which was another thing. Sheila didn’t know she was going to have a girl, but Tom did. She liked the not knowing, so he’d divined it when she was asleep, holding the pendulum over the little bulge of her pregnancy. There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt about it: it had gone backwards and forwards, steady as a clock. A boy would have made it go round and round. So he had to watch himself now: he was always wanting to say “she” and remembering just in time to say “it”.

Someone had said once that dust was matter in the wrong place.

Tom took the A303 at the end of the motorway. The countryside looked as spick and span as a new toy in the buttery morning light. Grazing sheep stood in the puddles of their shadows, and the sun, shining on a chalky hill, made the grass wink and ripple like the Serpentine. The only thing missing was skylarks. Tom saw a jay, two kestrels, a magpie and a big brown hawk that looked like somebody’s overcoat out for a spin on its own. He reckoned it must be a buzzard of some sort. Beyond Andover he stopped for petrol and took in a few deep and happy lungfuls of high-octane country air.

He reached Shaftesbury before noon and found the barn. The bloke helped him to unload the pews from the back of the van and paid in tenners. Tom stood in the sun, counting off the stack of notes. He liked money — the snakeskin feel of the paper, the finicky printed pictures. Like the one of Florence Nightingale and the moustached man with the bandaged head sitting up in bed in the Crimea. He’d asked Sheila once, “What’s on the back of a ten pound note?” She’d never noticed, which was odd since writers were supposed to be observant.

But then money was only a symbol. It was like everything else — you had to keep it on the move to make it work for you. A roll of the stuff in your back pocket was just lazy money. Think. Tom leaned against the side of the van, wrinkling his eyes against the light. What was going cheap in Dorset that people in London would give their eye-teeth for? It came to him in a stroke: the answer was all round him, in the sweet, animal, country smell of the air in his nose. He walked back to the barn and called to the bloke inside. “Hey, d’you know a place where I could pick up a ton or two of horse manure?”

It was nearly three o’clock before he was on his way again, with the van windows wound down to let out the pong. He stopped briefly at Fontmell Magna, where he saw a British Legion Bazaar going on in the parish hall. He bought a pair of old weighing scales with nice brass weights, a home-made fruit cake for Sheila and a fluffy monkey for his daughter.

At Weymouth he drove along the quay, past the moored yachts and the Sealink ferries, to the harbourmaster’s office. The harbourmaster was talking to a ship on his radio mike, saying Roger and Over rather more often than Tom suspected was strictly necessary. He looked at the photographs that were pinned to the fibreboard wall — black and white ones of old wrecks, coloured ones of a lifeboat in rough seas.

“Yes?”

“I’m looking for a boat with two masts. There’s an old bloke on it. On his own—”

“Calliope . Name of … Grey? G. Grey?”

“Yes,” Tom said, surprised by how quick the harbourmaster was on the uptake.

“There was a lady in last night, looking for him. Is she connected with you?”

“No,” Tom said. “I don’t think so.” Not unless he meant Sheila. But he couldn’t mean Sheila. It took some of the bloom off the expedition to find that he wasn’t alone on it.

“We went through it all then. He left here on the … 23rd, before the gale. I tried calling the Coastguard. He hasn’t reported in to them since the 22nd, when he left Lyme Regis. They put out a call for him on the VHF, but couldn’t raise him yesterday. He’s probably sitting out on a mooring somewhere darning his socks. How long’s he been out of touch, then?”

“Not all that long,” Tom was thinking of the stream of postcards; it would be stretching it a bit to say that Sheila’s dad had really been out of touch at all.

“I wouldn’t fuss yourself. They’re a funny lot, the single-handers. Especially the old fellers. They’re always disappearing and cropping up again in places where you least expect them. Bane of my life.”

“I’ll go further down the coast,” Tom said. “Try there.”

“You’d be looking for a needle in a haystack. He’ll be in the Solent now. You’d have to go to Lymington, Yarmouth, Cowes, Buckler’s Hard, Hamble, Pompey, Chichester Harbour — and I haven’t even started.” He wore the broad complacent smile of the man who’s sorry but can’t help.

“I’ll have to work it out,” Tom said.

“The lady who was in here looking for him. She had the look of someone. That singer who used to be on the television. Julie Whatsername.”

“Yeh?”

“Nightfall,” the harbourmaster said.

Tom took himself off to a café on the seafront, where he sat with a cup of weak tea, staring at the road atlas. Some kids were playing on the Pac-Man machine, which was keeping up a steady gobble-gobble-bleep of electronic noise. He got out his divining pendulum.

It was an old King Edward aluminium cigar tube, really. Tom had filled the bottom of it with molten lead and drilled a hole in the screw cap. He’d tied a length of nylon fishing line to a shirt button and threaded it through the hole. Letting the pendulum dangle on six inches of line, he held it over the atlas.

He was thinking a bit about Sheila’s dad, but mostly he was thinking of the boat. He thought: oak, larch, teak, mahogany .

The pendulum gave a definite tremble over Christchurch, but that was probably just an old echo, like the useless twitch that it made over Weymouth itself. He moved it along the coastline, almost touching the map with it, concentrating. Tom shut his eyes. He felt the pendulum quiver — like a tiny electric shock. Then it started to swing in steady circles, round and round and round and round, the nylon tugging between his thumb and forefinger. Tom looked to see where it was on the atlas. It was left of Southampton.

He put the pendulum away and finished his tea. On the way back to the van he saw a rack of postcards in a shop. He bought We can’t have that dangling — it’ll have to come off! to send to Trev.

28th March. 1015. Sea Area Wight. Wind W, veering NW, 4–5. Visibility good. Bar. 1008mb., rising .

In Lymington, Diana slammed the car door shut and went out to brave another dreary yacht marina. They were all the same — the same demented cowbell noise of metal rigging banging into metal masts, the same breezy good old boys in faded denims and braided captains’ hats. The marinas were uglier by far than the caravan sites. Every once-pretty river was spoiled by them. Where there had been rushbeds as thick as harvest corn, and seapink and milkwort and herb robert, there was now just pontoon on pontoon of expensive plastic toys. She must have seen millions of pounds’ worth of them already — idle, charmless things that tinkled in the wind and looked like nothing so much as dollops of fiddled income tax.