Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

She had woken in the hotel room at Poole feeling tired, helpless, out of place. The morning sun had robbed her quest of point and shadow. Over the Nescafe and stale croissant that passed for a “continental breakfast”, it looked a poor sad thing, too naked to face without a wince of embarrassment. This chasing after George only succeeded in making Diana seem more fractured, more incomplete to herself. Better to go botanising alone for lichens, or stay up all night waiting for the liquid wink of badgers’ eyes in the grotto.

The lusts of the flesh draw us to rove abroad; but when the time is past, what earnest thou home but a burdened conscience and a distracted heart?

Yes, but the trouble was that she was haunted by the dangerous line. Without a friend, thou canst not well live.

So she paid her bill with a mint American Express card and plugged on from marina to marina, putting the same unhopeful question at every place.

She opened the door of the blue Portakabin that served as an office. “I am looking,” she said, as she always said, “for a yacht called Calliope.”

28th March. 1020. Sea Area Dover. Wind W, 5–6. Visibility good. Bar. 1003mb., rising .

George had sailed through the night, cat-napping when he could. The swell left by the gale was still running, in steep black hills as cleanly contoured as desert dunes. They came racing from behind in the dark, seizing the boat in exhilarating swoops and plummetings. He found Antares on the sky, and tried to keep it in the starboard shrouds. With the wind astern and the swell on the quarter, the sea gathered him in and swept him headlong up the Channel.

At ten in the morning he found the Rye fairway buoy. The swell was breaking on the shallow sand of the bay and George was wary of tackling the harbour entrance. He called the harbourmaster on the radio. No problem, the voice said: there was plenty of water, the approach was to be taken carefully on 329°, and George was to moor at the piles below the office before going on upriver to the town.

He clung to the bearing and watched the needle on the echo sounder sink lower and lower down the face of the dial. He could see surf ahead, stained brown with sand, and a wooden dolphin marking the entrance to the harbour. Calliope switch-backed in the swell. He hadn’t eaten for … he couldn’t remember when. He felt too jumpily alert for his own good. 325°. 334°. 329°. He locked the boat on the magic number and saw the surf part to disclose a narrow, canal-like avenue of smooth water dead ahead.

A man in uniform was waiting to take his ropes at the piles.

“Thanks,” George said. “How much do I owe you? — I’m only staying for one night—” and saw that the man was not the harbourmaster but a customs officer.

“If I might come aboard, sir?” He was already there; a heavy man whose big pink marshmallow face looked innocently mismatched with the black serge and the clipboard that made up the rest of him. “Come far today?”

“Just from the Solent.”

“And where, exactly, on the Solent, sir, did you come from?”

“Oh … Southampton Water. The Itchen side. Eling, I think it was called.”

“When did you leave?”

“About six o’clock last night.”

“And what sort of weather did you have, sir?”

George shrugged. “You know. Much like it is now.”

“You tell me, sir.”

“Why the interrogation?”

“It’s not an interrogation. I’m just curious, sir.”

“The wind was westerly, Force 4. Heavy swell from the sou’west. Visibility good. I was able to steer by the stars.”

The man was making notes with a biro. George’s temper was fraying, but he ached to be rid of the man’s officious bulk and felt that compliance was the safest route.

“This is a big boat for one man to handle on his own, isn’t it, sir?”

“I manage.”

“D’you mind if I have a look-see below?”

“No.”

But all the warmth and friendliness of the saloon vanished with the man’s presence there. George felt he was watching his life being burgled before his eyes. He saw the saloon as the man saw it: its untidy scatter of books and discarded clothes, the empty whisky tumbler, the unplumped cushions, the cracked case of the transistor radio, the saucepan which had dislodged itself from the galley and fallen under the saloon table. The man was looking at Vera’s picture.

“Nice woodwork, sir.”

He opened lockers and drawers. In the forecabin, he rummaged through George’s socks and underpants. He lifted a floorboard and found the wine cellar in the forward bilges.

“Duty paid on these, sir?”

George pointed to the name of the English shipper on a bottle of Pomerol. The man nodded and turned to the chain locker.

George said: “You’ll find a tin full of money there, under a pile of chain.”

“Will I, sir?” The man’s eyes were as bland as a pair of poached eggs. He opened the locker door and reached inside. “Feels as if you’ve got a bit of a soft patch in the stem here …”

“I had the boat surveyed six weeks ago, thank you,” George said. “By a professional.”

“Oh, well—” the customs man’s voice was muffled by the locker. “You’ve nothing to worry about, have you?” He retrieved the Huntley & Palmer’s biscuit tin and brushed the rust off it. “Would you like to open that for me, please, sir?”

George did so.

“Crikey,” the man said. The sight of the money made his face turn suddenly into that of a boy. He was a fat milk monitor in short trousers. “How much you got in there, then?”

“Oh — about nineteen thousand pounds. Give or take, you know.”

“Some of it’s American money.”

“Yes. I think there are fifteen thousand dollars there; the rest’s in sterling.”

“In a tin.”

“Well, one has to keep it somewhere.”

“This is just what you take on holiday, is it?” The man laughed as if he’d said something immensely clever. Then, as if George had failed to get the joke, he solemnly elaborated it. “You could buy yourself a few ice-creams with that, couldn’t You?”

George was a little consoled. The man’s official dignity had crumpled so completely in the face of the money in the tin. The saloon, too, was beginning to look like the saloon again.

“You hear of people keeping it under the mattress, but …”

George put the lid back on the tin. He said, “Is there anything else you’d like to see?”

The man was rubbing his upper lip with his finger. “What do you need with all that money on a boat?”

“I don’t know,” George said. “I mean, I don’t. But it’s here. And it’s perfectly legal.”

“Oh, I wasn’t saying that it wasn’t,” the man said. He gazed at the flaked paint of the floral pattern on the tin. “Where’s the engine on this?”

George showed him to the wheelhouse, pulled up the floorboards and watched as the man climbed down and sat astride the engine in the gloom, puffing.

“You haven’t got a torch?”

George passed him the torch. He shone the beam on the batteries, the fuel tanks, the stowed electric generator. He looked up at George, his schoolboy face streaked with oil.

“From Southampton Water?”

“Yes.”

“At night?”

“Yes.”

“All by yourself?”

“Yes.” George laughed now.

“I don’t get it.” He hauled himself out of the engine room and shook himself down. As he left the boat, he stared at George’s face.

“You spend a lot of time abroad, then, sir?”

“I used to live in Africa, until last year.”