Jonathan Raban: Foreign Land: A Novel

Walking back to the van, Tom grinned inside his beard. Suppose he took the alky back with him … would Sheila notice that he’d got the wrong man?

30th March. 1100. Sea Area Plymouth. Wind NE, 3 or less. Visibility moderate or poor with fog banks in north. Bar. 1028mb., rising more slowly .

He wasn’t entirely sure of where he was. Before dawn he had picked up the triple flash of Start Point lighthouse on the starboard bow. It was a long way off — perhaps as much as 20 miles. Then the fog closed in. For a while, around 0530, George heard the distant siren on the Start, but couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from. By 0600 it was fading — whether because the thickening fog was muffling it or Calliope was drifting further away he didn’t know. Observing the drill, he blew up the dinghy, put on his lifejacket and stuck to his compass bearing.

Now the fog was standing in vertical banks with broad sunlit spaces in between. He was on a patch of clear water, where the fog drifted in thin wreaths like smoke; ahead, it formed a mountainous cathedral, with the sun shining on white buttresses, white pinnacles, white cloisters, arches and side chapels. There was a ship close by somewhere, its horn mooing intermittently like an angry bullock. George hoped that someone out there was watching his radar screen and had located him as a bright splash on the glass. Minutes later Calliope rolled on the ship’s wash, which issued slantwise, tall and syrupy from the base of the fog cathedral.

Then (was the boat sailing into the fog or the fog marching forward to include the boat?) he could see nothing. Even Calliope’s bow was fuzzed and grey in the deep blind twilight of the fog. He listened for horns. Silence. Nor were there any vessels calling on the VHF overhead. It seemed to George that the boat was turning in slow circles as the fog swirled, but the compass said no; they were locked on a course of 269° with the card hardly stirring in its bowl. Calliope lurched once, but so gently that the wake might have come from a ship several miles off. In the smooth water a ship’s wake could travel a long way unhindered, and you couldn’t say with any certainty if it signalled an imminent collision or was the ghostly echo of a vessel long since departed.

“In this sort of water, you see, a wake can travel one hell of a long way,” George said, speaking to Teddy, whom he saw sitting at the chart table, glooming over the soundings and the double daggers of the wrecks.

Calliope emerged from the fog with the abruptness of a train coming out of a tunnel. It took less than a minute for impenetrable dusk to change to a blue morning under a sunny sky. The English Channel was an unruffled lake, hemmed in by chalky, Himalayan cliffs. At noon, there was no problem about finding the sun; George would have needed the darkest glass on the sextant to shield his eyes from its blazing image. The trouble was that the cliffs blotted out the horizon. There was no question of taking a sight.

At 1500, it was clear to the south, though there were still fog peaks and hills to the north and east. George went out into the cockpit and brought the westering sun down until it touched the horizon in the mirror. 1508 and 11 seconds. 43° dead on. He returned to the wheelhouse and started to figure it out, covering a page of the log with calculations. The intercept on the position line put him at 50° 03’ N and 4° 32’ W. If he’d done his sums right, and the sextant angle was correct, then the tide must have carried him much further south and west than his position by dead reckoning. St Cadix was about 20 miles away to the north and already beginning to drift astern. There were two things that he wanted to settle there (he could have done them both in an hour); but never mind, they were not that important. He reset his course, aiming to pass well wide of the Lizard.

At 0015 he was joined by a school of porpoises. Their phosphorescent tracks went criss-crossing round his bows. He saw the shiny humps of their backs in the water as they came racing in from the beam, playing friendly games in the night. The horizon was clear. George climbed on to the wheelhouse roof and hauled the two red riding lights up the mizzen mast to signal Vessel Not Under Command. Then he slept for an hour and a half — a shallow, anxious sleep disturbed by rather too vivid dreams of the looming sides of ships.

His next sun sight put him at 90 miles northwest of Ushant. Sheila, smelling of bathtime, craned over his shoulder as he scribbled figures in the log.

The BBC shipping forecast at 1355 came a little faintly over the transistor set. Through the crackles of static he heard that the Azores High was still drifting northeast and intensifying. The barograph in the saloon was showing 1033 now. What wind there was came out of the hazy sky from the north, but the air in the boat was warm and Gulf Streamy. The forecast for Biscay was Variable, 3 or less, Visibility moderate. It was balmy picnic high-pressure weather. On the time signal at 1400, George turned his watch back to Greenwich Mean Time.

He saw the tunnymen as a line of spidery type on the haze ahead. He switched on the VHF to see if they were talking, and the wheelhouse filled with a deafening burst of Spanish. The language threw George for a moment; it was Portuguese, comically distorted in a concave mirror. He listened intently, hoping to find out what the fleet was doing, and heard an overwrought baroque story about a cardinal and a transvestite whore. In Spanish it was funnier than it would have been in English; George laughed and repeated the punchline aloud.

He steered Calliope cautiously through the floating village of boats built like giant smoothing irons, broad in the beam with pointed bows and long flat sterns. They tittupped gently on the lazy swell with their engines stopped. They were in luck. Rodsmen in yellow oilskins lined their sterns, yanking silver skipjack over their heads as fast as they could keep their arms pumping. They were spraying the sea with blood, and round each boat the water boiled with tuna. The tunnymen’s after-decks were stacked solid with glittering heaps of dead fish.

Someone was calling to George from the deckhouse of the nearest boat. He went out into the cockpit and cupped his hands to his ears.

“¿Qué?” he shouted.

“¿Quiere pescado?” The voice came in as a reedy whisper on the wind.

“Gracias! Si, por favor!”

He motored in close across the water. He could hear the hammering of the newly-caught tuna as they thrashed in the scuppers, kicking up a delirious commotion with what little was left of their lives. A man in a woolly hat with a face as dark as a Creole’s threw two fish across to Calliope . They thumped wetly on the cabin roof and rolled on to the deck, where they lay against the toerail like a pair of small torpedoes.

“¿Quiere más? Hay mucho!”

“No, es perfecto! Muchas gracias.”

“¿Adonde va?”

“Bastante lejos.”

“¿En ese pequeño barco?”

“Es bastante grande para mí.”

“Buena suerte!”

“Gracias! Y a usted!”

He slipped past the last of the fleet. The sea was as wide open as the sky. Far bluer than the constrained and muddy British seas, it was the colour of a blue brocade ribbed with silver thread. The depth sounder, whose scale went up to forty fathoms, had stopped registering long ago, but George was keeping an eye on the black ant march of his pencilled crosses on the chart. They were over the Continental Shelf now, with the ground plunging away from under the boat. There were a thousand metres of water below, then two thousand, three thousand, four thousand. The sea was deeper than mountains were high.