Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“Don’t worry, mate. I’ll get your stuff for you. I’ll see you all right.”

“Yes. I know you will.” He gave the book to Rick, who glanced through the photographs in the middle and said “Fark!” over a picture of a storm in the Tasman Sea.

An hour later, with Rick despatched into the town, George walked to the station, carrying the tin of money in Vera’s bag for safekeeping. He took a train to Dover that stopped at every halt along the way, its hydraulics wheezing. George, in a compartment to himself, looked out of the smudged window at a sunny, unreal England of wooden oast-houses, hop poles, half-timbered Tudor cottages and signs saying ANTIQUES. It was all perfectly foreign to him. He didn’t love it. He felt no responsibility for it. It was out there; he was here; and here was somewhere else. Somewhere else altogether. He lit his pipe. The train stopped by a pig farm with an exhausted sigh of the brakes.

At Dover, he went to the Admiralty chart agent’s, on a dusty upper floor of what had once been a grain warehouse. The man had most of the sheets that George had listed. He stacked them on the counter and added the latest corrections in red ink.

“Is this for the real thing, or just a bit of armchair sailing?”

“The real thing,” George said.

The man looked at the chart he was marking. “I believe the only navigation aids you really need round here are flamethrowers and submachine guns.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s as bad as that.”

“Rather you than me.”

At the chandler’s further down the street, George bought a Q-flag and two red lamps. He returned to the station, where he paced the empty platform. He was frightened of finding himself at a standstill now; he needed to keep on the move. When the train did eventually begin to gather way, he leaned back in his seat against the greasy carriage cloth and closed his eyes, pacified by motion.

When he got back to Rye, he found that his boy had multiplied. There were three of them now. They stood smoking on the quay, guarding a small herd of supermarket trolleys.

They were as short and skinny as Montedorians. George dwarfed them all.

“Looks first-rate!” In the heaped trolleys he saw powdered milk, tinned peas, nuts, maize oil, spaghetti, treacle pudding, jars of marmalade. “Wasn’t no dried eggs,” Rick said. “Not in Tesco’s or the International.” The pale, parsnip faces of the lounging boys gave nothing away; they smoked and stared into the middle distance. Geoge put them on details.

It was like the old days. He retained Rick to help him stow the stores. Boy 2 was on the water detail, filling up the tank with a hose from the standpipe on the quay. Boy 3 was sent to the garage to arrange the delivery of diesel fuel. They worked on into the dark by lamplight, filling the lockers and carrying away gash in plastic bags, while George stood by with a notebook keeping a close record of what went where.

He saw Boy 2 slouching in the shadows, kicking at stones.

“Chop-chop!” George said, and clapped his hands. Boy 2 gave him a mystified grin, but went back to work.

He ate at a restaurant where he wrote a long letter on five sides of borrowed foolscap. He gave it to the waitress to stamp and post. Returning to the boat, he thought he saw the obese figure of the customs officer skulking under the trees; but when he crossed over to the quay whoever it was had gone.

He collapsed into sleep in his clothes in the saloon. Waking, badly creased, at seven, to the bitter smell of the paraffin lamps which had burned out in the night, he looked out at the grey dribble of tide working its way up the dyke fifty yards astern.

He was impatient to be off. At eight, when he was on his third mug of coffee, the dirty water was only beginning to trickle round the rudder. He lit the charcoal stove and tried to read. I am greatly changed , Stella said, then the print skittered in front of George’s eyes. He rechecked the tide table in the almanac and realized that he’d forgotten to add an hour for British Summer Time. And it would be even later at Strand Quay.

At 0940 Calliope stumbled upright and came clear. George pulled in the two ropes that held her at the bow and stern and pushed her away from the quay with a boathook.

Motoring downstream against the sweep of the incoming tide, he felt his jitters subsiding. The barograph was up to 1018 millibars, and it was blowing a placid 3-touching-4 from the north. Beyond the dolphin at the harbourmouth, he hoisted the sails and cut the engine. At the fairway buoy, he put Calliope on a course of 255° to clear Beachy Head, just visible away to the southwest. The wind (as he explained to Diana) would be blowing off the shore, so the sea would be smooth and they’d have an easy beam reach of it for as far ahead as he could see.

The water glared. George pulled the brim of his cap over his eyes. All the letters had gone; only the # survived.

29th March 1300. Sea Area Wight. Wind N, 3 or 4. Visibility fair. Bar. 1020mb., rising .

The search for George had become so impossibly quixotic that Diana was enjoying it again. She had stayed the night at Chichester; during the morning she had looked for Calliope at Littlehampton and Shoreham. No trace. No dice. She drove down a ramp into Brighton Marina. Its dazzling concrete looked like something out of “Star Wars”—an enormous white extra-terrestrial invasion of the cliffs. She stopped the car at a tiger-striped barrier and reached through the window to take a parking ticket from the machine. The arm lifted in a stiff salute to let her through. At the same moment, the barrier on the other side went up to release a disreputable-looking transit van. Diana, catching a powerful whiff of manure mixed with ozone, thought of her garden, and the dying gingko tree. She parked the car and climbed the steps to the office. She leaned on the wall for a minute, looking out to the sea. There was a pair of rusty sails on the horizon — the first tan sails that she’d seen in three days. They were the right colour for Calliope . But it couldn’t be George. Whoever it was was going west.

29th March 1830. Sea Area Wight. Wind N 3, veering NE. Visibility fair, locally poor. Bar. 1023 mb., rising .

In Newhaven, Tom checked all the bars along the wharfsides. He went to the Alma, the Prince Albert, the Ship, the Calais Packet. In the Ancient Briton he stopped long enough to down a 7-Up. He had an idea.

Sheila’s dad was a secret drinker. Tom remembered the bottle he kept hidden in his bag when he was in London. If he was on a bender now, it would explain the sudden vagueness of the divining pendulum, which had taken to swinging in wide circles over half of England. He’d left the boat, Tom reckoned. He was probably sleeping rough somewhere in a fog of booze, not knowing where he was, not knowing who he was, most likely, poor old bugger.

On the street, an alky came shuffling out of the shadows.

“Give us a divvy, son? Fifty pee? For a bus fare?”

The stubble on the man’s face was white and there was a sickly blush on his cheeks. His breath smelled sweet, of rotten apples.

“Where are you trying to get to?”

“York, son.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder as if York was somewhere round the back of the abandoned cinema.

Tom gave him a new fiver.

“Good luck, son.” Then, staring more closely at the note, he said, “You’re a king.” He scuttled away, limping, his greasy trenchcoat flapping over a pair of starved and bony knees. Tom watched him take up residence in a den of rubbish under the great bland wall of the cinema.