Foreign Land

CHAPTER TEN

It must be the effect of the seasickness pill. The chemist — who’d brought Diana a glass of water from the back of the shop to swig it down with — had said that it might make her feel drowsy. Well, there was drowsy and drowsy. Her vision tended to wobble and there was a definite buzz in the flesh of her arms and legs. The sensation was actually quite nice, but it roused unnerving echoes of things that she’d aged out of long ago, like the little foil-wrapped slugs of Acapulco Gold that she used to keep in the bedroom closet on Ocean Avenue.

She sat up at the front of the boat with the anchors, hands clasped round her knees, watching the sea slide round and under her, as if the boat was a boulder breaking the stream of an enormous river. The sea kept on coming; an unending drift of open water, teased and crimped by a wind as faint and irregular as the breath of a sleeping invalid. On the shadowy side of the hull she could see jellyfish — whole schools of them, sailing past a foot or so beneath the surface, like tasselled art-deco lampshades on the run. Their colours were so immodest … purple, mauve, blue and livid scarlet. As she watched they changed in size, swelling as big as buckets then gathering themselves to the size of a clenched fist. One moment she thought them beautiful; the next they were disgusting, with their wrinkled glassy skins and trailing guts.

She’d been here before, but it was so long ago, when you lay back in the scatter-cushions and found yourself up on a high wire, not knowing which way you were going to fall, into a good trip or into a bad one. If you thought about it, it always turned out bad; you had to go with it, feed it, nurse it along.

She focused on a single small jellyfish, trying to count its mass of radiant filaments; then, as if she was carrying a tray full of water and not spilling a drop, she transferred her attention to the warty, galvanized steel of the anchor at her feet.

From the moment that they’d left the quay, things had started to seem more than a bit odd. First the boat (which had seemed so solid, so cottagey, when it was tied up) had shrunk to a walnut shell as it nosed out into the estuary. Then George Grey had grown. Perhaps it was just that ridiculous cap (H LSUM — AM R CA’S #1 B AD, whatever, in God’s name, that meant), but he seemed to have put on a good eighteen inches overnight. He had been stooping, apologetic, Eeyoreish. Now he was disconcertingly tall. He seemed possessed by some private, and rather irritable, good humour, as he danced round his boat from end to end in baggy jeans and scuffed plimsolls, with the sunlight glinting in his infant silver beard.

They had stolen past the lifeboat, through the line of moored yachts. The river didn’t look like water at all — it had a deep substantial gleam to it, like polished brass. “No flies in this ointment!” George Grey had called to her in a voice too loud for the still morning. As they passed the candy-striped beacon on St Cadix Head, she had gone up front to get out of earshot of the heavy bass chatter of the engine. A moment later, he was dancing again — pulling up sails the colour of red rust. Mostly they hung slack from the masts; every so often a sudden exhalation of wind would make them clatter over her head and shake out their wrinkles, but they seemed to be there only for show, really. George Grey had looked up at them with such obvious pride that she wondered if he’d cut and sewn them all himself.

“They’re a very pretty colour,” she said politely.

He gazed at her, smiling, as if she’d said something surprising and original. “Yes,” he said. “They work by suction, you know — like an aerofoil. They generate lift …” Then his face clouded and he went back to his wheelhouse, where she watched him through the window, his big untidy head bent over his compasses and charts and rulers and whatnot.

Now he was back again, a towering jack-in-a-box. He was carrying a heavy, rubberclad pair of binoculars. “Have you ever seen your house from the sea?”

“Oh — I hadn’t noticed where we were.”

She took the binoculars and found the cottage, framed between cliffs of birdlimed granite. The curtains in the bedroom were carelessly half-drawn and the kitchen window was open. It looked as if she was still inside. Weird. She said, “God, it’s like being your own ghost, isn’t it?” The heron was fishing from the wet rocks below the drawing room. She imagined herself stepping out of the front door and the heron flapping off on stiff and creaky wings. She passed the binoculars back a shade more hurriedly than she had meant.

“How fast are we going?”

“Oh, not very fast. About five knots.”

“What is a knot?”

“It’s a measure of speed through the water. One nautical mile in an hour. On the old ships, they used to chuck out a block of wood from the stern and see how many feet of rope it would unwind in a given time from a revolving drum … a fishing-reel thing. The rope was marked off with knots, so they just had to count the knots on the rope to find out how fast they were going.” He was scanning the coast through his binoculars. “But that’s not our real speed. That’s just our speed through the sea. But the sea’s moving too. It’s travelling with us on this tide, out to the Atlantic. It’s making about three knots, here, so we’re moving over the ground at about eight. If I turned the boat round, our speed would drop to two knots.”

“I see.” Diana didn’t see at all, but what he was saying corresponded with her own sense that things were relative and slippery here at sea.

“Have you given up?”

“What?”

“Smoking,” he said.

“Oh.” She didn’t catch on immediately; she thought (was she really so jellyfish-transparent?) that he was talking about dope. “No. Sometimes I just forget to.”

“You ought to forget to more often,” he said in his new, sea captain’s voice. “Do you a world of good.” He went off to do something with a rope at the far end of the boat. He was, Diana heard with astonishment, singing. “Get that tiger,” George Grey sang, “Get that tiger … Get that old tiger rag!”

He was full of information this morning. When she’d arrived at the quay and he stowed away the things she’d brought for lunch in the tiny kitchen of the boat, he rattled on about his daughter’s baby — quite out of character with his reticence last night. It was expected on September 28th … Sheila had had a scan but didn’t want to know the sex of the child in advance … It was, thought Diana, v. odd. This time, she was the one who was embarrassed: since reading The Noblest Station, she had rather cooled on the lady. She’d found the book voguish and a bit pretentious — the sort of book that people wrote by copying bits out of other people’s books in libraries and reassembling them. It hadn’t spoken directly to her at all. George Grey, though, had talked as if her only interest was in his daughter. For the first time, he’d seemed just like everyone else that one met at people like the Walpoles’, dismally crowing over the doings of their children.

“Yes,” he’d said, his head and shoulders framed in the hatchway, “apparently Tom — her … chap — is the one who’s going to the ante-natal classes.”

“Oh, really?” was all she could say to that.

At noon, he came out of his wheelhouse carrying what Diana assumed to be a sextant. He sat on the cabin roof with the instrument clamped to his eye, as absorbed and solemn as if he was performing a religious office.

“Are we lost already?” she called, but he gave no sign of hearing. She could see the twisty pillars of white steam from the china clay works near St Austell, and Dodman Point like a portion of apple crumble in the haze.

He padded back to the wheelhouse, muttering numbers. She saw him behind the glass, poring intently over the chart table. She had always liked the priest’s air of self-containment as he got on with the business of the Mass up at the holy end, and in George Grey’s face there was the same kind of seminarian youthfulness. His tongue showed between his lips, and the expression of his mouth and eyes was unmasked as he turned the page of a book as fat as a family Bible.

A few minutes later, he was back. “I was about a mile out,” he said. “Not bad, after thirty-five years.”

A mile seemed rather a lot to Diana, but she said, “No. That must be reassuring. I suppose it’s like riding bicycles.” A huge and psychedelic jellyfish, gorged with blood, floated past the rail. “Are they Portuguese men-of-war?”

“Where?” He was looking in the wrong place, at the horizon.

“The jellyfish.”

“Oh … no, I don’t think so. They’re too small, aren’t they?”

“They look enormous to me.” She remembered Father McKinley, lonely in his white air-conditioned church, raising the Host into a beam of bland Pacific sun. Then, at lunch, they’d started with artichokes and hot butter. Father McKinley had stared at the spiky vegetable on his plate as if he’d never seen anything like it in his life. He watched Diana eating, and clumsily copied every movement that she made. Afterwards, having treated the finger bowl like a stoup, he said: “So clever of you, Diana. I just love asparagus.” That was the thing about priests: they knew everything and nothing all at once.

For lunch on the boat, she laid out an ascetic, priestly picnic in the cockpit: sticks of celery, two kinds of cheese, French bread, green olives. George Grey uncorked a bottle of wine that looked far too extravagant for the occasion. She sipped it and studied the label. Leoville-Barton 1971.

“It’s terribly good,” she said.

“It’s travelled too much,” he said, but didn’t explain. She watched the wake of the boat dwindling behind them, the ghostly bulk of the Cornish coast, a long way off now, too far to swim. George Grey’s face, shadowed by the peak of his cap, looked suddenly very unfamiliar. It was like the face of a man in a neighbouring car in a traffic jam, yet the littleness of the boat and the wide emptiness of the sea made him seem almost as close as if they were in the same bed. She munched noisily on a celery stick and hoped that he wasn’t thinking the same thing.

“It looks as if we’re going to get a bit of wind.” He was frowning at the water ahead. It was an even blue except for a broad, inky stripe along the horizon.

“Oh?”

“The barometer’s dropping. We’ll turn when the tide turns.” He leaned back in the cockpit, arms spreadeagled, his knobbly wrists sticking out a long way from the cuffs of his jumper. With an open palm he made himself the sponsor of the sea, the tall sky, the jellyfish, the easy lollop of the boat on the water. “Well?” When he smiled he showed receding gums and overlong teeth.

“It’s magic,” she said. “It’s so … laden.” She stopped herself from saying what she was really thinking, which was that it was just like smoking. As the hash took hold, you found yourself in free fall, out of control of your own sensations. Everything took you by surprise. As now. The diving guillemot past George Grey’s shoulder was astonishing: it looked like a bathtoy. Then there was the grubby Band Aid round the base of his thumb; wrinkled, pink, prosthetic. Every time she caught sight of something, it swelled to fill her field of vision. The air round the boat was hard and glittery: if you listened closely, you’d hear it tinkle. She heard it tinkling. It sounded full of iron filings. Trying to kill this train of thought, she lifted her glass, but the vibration of the engine made the surface of the wine tremble and she saw it as a rippling sea.

She said: “You’ve hurt your hand.”

“It’s nothing. Just a scratch.”

When the wind came, she felt the boat tilt and stiffen, the red sails setting as smooth and hard as if they’d been moulded on to the masts in painted plaster. The sea, too, suddenly changed texture, scissored by the wind into little houndstooth crests that went spitting past the rail. With the engine off, she listened to the busy noise of wood and water, of slaps and creaks and gurgles. Spray was breaking over the boat’s nose, wetting the sail at the front and making a bright corona in the air. Diana, gripping a wooden handle at the back of the wheelhouse, hardly dared to breathe for fear of breaking the spell. It was like … well, nothing on earth, nothing on land. It felt as if the boat was dangling between the top of the sky and the bottom of the sea, as weightless as a money spider on its thread of luminous gum.

It made Diana dizzy, but it was the nicest sort of dizziness, like dreams of floating through the air. In need of ballast, she looked across to the rim of dark land, and found the land gone. It had vanished clean off the face of the sea, and the boat was in the dead centre of a gigantic disc of squally water. She searched the far sky for hills, for Cornwall. There was nothing there at all, and Diana felt the first, niggling spasm of alarm.

George Grey was in the wheelhouse, steering by hand now. The boat lurched as she stepped inside, and she lost her balance and collided into him. He smelled of diesel oil and the stuff that he used on his hair.

“Sorry—” she said. He steadied her with his arm, and for the second time she had the vivid, disturbing sense of having found a stranger in her bed. This time, though, there was something dangerous and arousing in the thought.

“Don’t worry. It always takes one a while to find one’s sea-legs. You’re doing very well.” He was looking at the sea, not at her, and she found herself irrationally resenting his distracted attention.

“I can’t see the land any more.”

“Oh, you’re much safer out of sight of land. There’s less to bump into.”

“Just you.”

“Yes—” He laughed; a light, dry, naval man’s laugh. “There’s always me, of course.”

“Do you know where we are?”

“Just … there.” He leaned over from the wheel and pointed to a pencilled cross — one of many — on the chart. It was an inch or two away from a diagonal line which stretched out across a white sea dotted with small printed numbers.

“Are these … fathoms?”

“No, metres.” He looked over her shoulder at the chart. “Thirty-two metres. That’s about a hundred feet.”

“Is that all?” She was disappointed. “It feels … much deeper,” she said, and immediately felt silly for saying it. But George Grey said, “Yes, doesn’t it?” and she watched the silver bristles round his mouth catch the sun as he smiled. “I always think that’s the best part — the feeling of all that water underneath.”

“Doesn’t it sometimes scare you?”

“Oh, yes. I suppose that’s really its point.”

It had begun to scare Diana. Even wedged in the seat by the chart table, she was having to cling on tight to stop herself from falling as the boat rolled and wallowed. The little pointed waves had changed into long furrows and ridges of sea with dribbling crests of foam.

“When do we turn round?”

“We turned. Ten minutes ago.”

“Did we?” The sea looked just the same. “But the sails — they’re out on the same side of the boat.”

“Yes, I eased off the sheets; we’re running now.”

He was snowing her with salty talk. Do I trust this man? The boat slewed, plunged downwards, and came up bobbing like the guillemot. Diana thought: I hardly even know the guy. She saw a wave building up behind them. It was big, untidy, all lumps and bulges. At its top, the water was being churned into frothy cream. This isn’t me. The wave was moving faster than the boat: it came rolling up and under the back end, lifting them so that Diana felt her stomach drop and saw the sky slide down.

“Arthur,” George Grey said, spinning the spokes of the wheel.

“What?” She heard the shake in her voice.

“You call the big ones Arthur. It helps to make them feel smaller.”

She laughed. Too loud. Too madly. “Every wave looks like Arthur to me.”

“It’s a bit sloppy. But the boat’s quite happy.”

“It’s nice to know that someone is. Oh God — Arthur’s big brother is right behind us.”

George laughed. The boat rolled on its side as if it was going to go right over, and came up straight again, leaving Diana clinging to the strap above her head.

“She’s looking after us very nicely indeed,” George said.

“Well,” Diana said, at least an octave above her normal pitch, “anyway, I’m not throwing up. I think that’s about all that can be said for me.”

“You see — you’re a natural sailor.”

She wasn’t reassured. It was quite possible, she thought, that George Grey was crazy — really and truly crazy, like the people who told you, in the flattest, most commonsensical way, that they were reincarns, or God, or extra-terrestrial visitors. The man’s voice was somehow too dangerously normal for the circumstances.

“How close are we to land?” she said.

“Oh … not far now.” He was smiling.

The waves were overtaking the boat like badly wrapped parcels. The sea flared and collapsed under her feet. Diana felt her old dread surfacing in her like a forgotten friend. She recognized it with a rush of panic.

There’d been a time when the world felt like this most Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, or Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays; a time when Diana couldn’t hear of an aeroplane taking off with a friend in it without seeing it crash. Wherever she went, she brought with her a sense of imminent catastrophe. If she sat in a bar among the other drinkers, she saw cancers, automobile accidents, cardiac arrests, murders and suicides. Her dreams were full of deaths, sometimes her own, more often those of friends, acquaintances, total strangers. She saw the mailman dead in a dream; in another, Bobby Kennedy was shot six months before it happened, and Diana felt sick with guilt when she saw it on Walter Cronkite; for one appalling day, she knew her dream had somehow caused the real assassination.

That was when she started going to Dr Nussbaum. He helped a little. Later, she found Father McKinley, who had helped a lot. The low ceiling of dread, under which she lived like a crouched animal, slowly lifted. Inch by inch, corner by corner, until she began to breathe again. Supermarkets were her worst places. She had to dare herself to enter them, and by the time she reached the checkouts she was sometimes trembling so violently that no-one would share the line with her. In the Piggly Wiggly one morning she realized that the ceiling was gone. That was all over. Never, please God, would she ever feel like that again.

Now, to her horror, she was seeing George Grey dead. She couldn’t see how he was dead: it wasn’t an obvious thing like being drowned at sea. It was the bristles on his chin. They were going on growing. He was dead and his beard was alive. It was luxuriant, spreading, and the face behind it was like a lump of tallow, with an opaque coating of blue film over the open eyes.

“Watch out, it’s Arthur again,” he said. “You’re doing fine.”

Arthur was a relief. It made her hold on tight and think of nothing but sea as the boat rolled and slid over the breaking white top of the wave.

“We touched seven and a half knots just then. I didn’t know she could do it. And that’s under sail alone.”

Diana stared at the little numbers on the chart in front of her. If you really tried, you could manage your own mind as he was managing this boat. You could steer it away from danger and get home safely after all. She wasn’t a believer any more. She couldn’t pray, but she could still use the words. On the white paper sea of the chart she made words happen until they were almost as clear as if they’d been printed there. They were from Thomas à Kempis, her favourite. Once, she’d had great chunks of The Imitation of Christ off by heart. She could come up with some good fragments, even now.

Without a friend, thou canst not well live … No, not that one. She focused on the chart again. The boat dived and aimed itself at the sky.

Occasions of adversity best discover how great virtue or strength each man hath. For occasions do not make a man frail, but they show what he is. Here, men are proved as gold in a furnace …

“A calliope’s a merry-go-round steam organ, isn’t it?” George Grey said.

“What? Oh … yes, they have them at carnivals in California.”

“This is more like a switchback, I’m afraid.”

“Big Dipper.” On the chart she saw: If thou wilt withdraw thyself from speaking vainly, and from gadding idly, as also from hearkening after novelties and rumours, thou shalt find leisure enough for meditation on good things. The greatest saints avoided the society of men and did rather choose to live to God in secret. One said, “As oft as I have been among men, I returned home less of a man than I was before.” She thought: it’s OK, I’m in control.

Yet every time she looked at it, the sea was scarier. It was sudsy and tumbled and shoreless. She wanted to ask what time George Grey expected to get home, but the look of the water made the question sound idiotic in her head; the noise of it, too, as it rushed at the hull and the wind went whining and crackling round the masts and rigging. Will we be back in time for tea? didn’t seem the thing to say.

When they were in the dark trough of the next wave, he said, “It’s odd, you know …” His voice was flat, as if he was starting out on a technical lecture. “I didn’t know about Sheila … my daughter’s baby until last night, when you told me. I was rather … rattled by it, in fact. She hadn’t said a word to me, but she goes round talking about it on the television.” He steered the boat up a long grey slope of foamy sea. “One wonders what one’s done to deserve it.”

It is better oftentimes and safer that a man should not have many consolations in this life. She said: “Do you believe we ever deserve what we get?”

“Oh, yes. Sometimes,” he said. “Things like income tax. Unfinished crosswords. Flat feet.”

“When it comes to being mean, parents and children knock husbands and wives into a cocked hat.”

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose I do deserve it, really. Don’t you loathe your ancestors? I do, and most of the poor sods were perfectly harmless.”

“The ones in the pictures …”

“Yes. It’s bloody awful, you know, to realize that you’re turning into an ancestor yourself. Bloody awful.”

As the boat lurched suddenly sideways and she grabbed for the strap, she saw herself and George as two peas, rattling loosely in one pod. When they came upright again, she said, “I always wanted children.”

“You … haven’t …?”

“No. I got pregnant when I was twenty-two. It was just when my first single was coming out. I had it aborted. They managed to louse up my … equipment.” She was amazed to hear those words hanging there in the wheelhouse, all mixed up with the noise of the sea. It was something she never spoke of to anyone. Why here? Why to him?

“What was … the record?”

“‘Please Don’t Write Me a Letter’.” She laughed — a long ripple of relief. “It must have been ahead of its time. It sold around nine copies.”

“What foul luck.” He looked round at her for a moment. “And the father? Who was he?”

“He was a conman.”

“Fathers often are.”

“He was my agent.”

“Look — there’s your land. Over there.”

She couldn’t see it at first. Then, between waves, she saw the greasy smear in the sky, far higher up than she’d expected. It was almost overhead. And it was on the wrong side. It wasn’t Cornwall at all. The boat rolled badly. She felt helplessly disoriented. He’d been playing some fool Alice in Wonderland trick on her all along.

She said dully, “Is that … France?”

“No, it’s the Head.”

“St Cadix Head?” She didn’t believe him.

“See the beacon? Up there, to the left?”

It was true. He was right, but it still looked like another country. There were no houses, no trees. It was a misty mountain of granite. It didn’t look like anyone’s home, let alone hers. It was only when they moved into its shelter that she realized that it must have been raining heavily all afternoon. Out at sea it was as if there was no weather at all. Now she saw that it was one of those ordinary March days when you couldn’t see to the other side of the estuary; a day that would flood the stream in the garden and drown the early primroses.

“How far out from land did we go?”

“Oh, no distance, really. Two and a half miles, perhaps.”

“I thought we were way out on the ocean.”

“It always seems like that when the visibility gets bad.” He turned the wheel and the boat swung round in the calm, rain-pocked water, until the sails began to flap like lines of washing. When he left the wheelhouse to pull the sails down from the masts, she said, “Can I help?” but he said, “No — stay in the dry, there’s no point in both of us getting wet.”

She enjoyed watching him working up at the front of the boat. As he gathered in the unruly sodden canvas, his big underlip jutting forward in an expression of angry concentration, he looked like a man fighting with eagles. His arms and head were tangled in the flailing sails — he was losing — then he conquered them. Binding them down to their wooden spar, he raised his head, checked the drifting land and smiled at Diana through the window; a hesitant, lopsided victor’s smile. His shirt-tail had come unstuck from his trousers and was wagging in the wind. She wanted to tuck it in for him.

They motored up the estuary through the rain. Watching the slate roofs slide by, she found something illicit in this sailor’s view of the village. Between their setting out this morning and their coming home this afternoon, St Cadix seemed to have slipped off-centre, to have lost a measure of its reality. Diana inspected it with the kind of caution (wanting to believe in it, but alert to each false note) that she felt when the curtain went up on a stage set. She saw Jellaby’s van, parked like a prop on Lower Marine Drive. The gilt hands on the church clock were stuck (a hackneyed touch on the part of the designer) at twenty to eleven. The wet and rigid flag outside the Yacht Club was a shade too new; and Betty Castle, dismounting from her sit-up-and-beg bicycle by the post office, looked like a character in a tedious old-fashioned play.

George, at the wheel, nodded at the waterfront. “There you are. Home Sweet Home …”

“It doesn’t look real.”

“Oh, it’s real enough, all right. Too bloody real for me. Do you know that bitch with the bicycle?”

“Betty Castle.”

“Yes. How does she manage to make herself so ubiquitous? She’s the genius of the place.”

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”

“What?”

“Practice, practice, practice.”

The boat turned and held still on the incoming tide. George nursed it alongside the quay, nudging it into a slot between the scallop boats. He stepped ashore with an armful of rope; Diana went downstairs to put a kettle of water on the gas stove.

The saloon smelled of the voyage. It had a strong swampy odour that she recognized as the smell that always hung around after one had enjoyed a dangerous pleasure. When George came back, he looked exhausted. His face was slack, his skin seemed translucent. There were raw grazes on his hands.

He said: “I’m sorry. I’m afraid we got caught out there. My fault. I should’ve taken more notice of the barograph. Was it hell for you?”

She was looking at the framed photograph of the fat black woman on the wall. “No …” she said. “It was … extraordinary. Like … dreaming.”

“Yes,” he said, sounding vague. “But there was nothing wrong with the boat. She was perfect.”

She was glad to see, when he poured whisky into tumblers, that his hand was shivering a little. Seeing her noticing, he said, “I always get the shakes after going to sea. Don’t know why. After I stood my first full watch alone … in a corvette … I had to be practically tied into my bunk, I was such a rattletrap.”

Diana rummaged in her bag. She shook its contents out over the saloon cushions, as if she was sowing the twists of Kleenex, chapsticks, blunt pencils, keys, small change, empty match-books, the reel of measuring tape and the crumpled letter from Harry, like seeds.

“What have you lost?”

“My cigarettes.”

“You haven’t smoked all day.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, finding them. “I’ll catch up.”

The kettle came whistling to the boil. While Diana made coffee, George scribbled with a fountain pen in the black account book that he called “the ship’s log”. Later, he went upstairs and she was able to sneak a look at what he’d written. It wasn’t much.

Arr. St Cadix 1640. Log: 0026.7. Wind S by W, 5 gusting to 6. Vis mod, then poor. Bar: 1019, falling rapidly. Check drip on sterngland. Renew jib halyard. Otherwise A-OK.

Diana felt wounded. She didn’t figure in the story at all.

“Someone,” said T. Jellaby, “is getting his leg over.”

“So long as it’s not you,” Vic Toms said. Vic had come into the shop, after hours, to swap “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for “The Return of the Jedi”.

“Captain Birdseye.”

“Oh?” Vic was reading the label on the cassette. He was a careful man. Most people just looked at the title and the names of the stars. Vic went for the small print. He wanted to know the directors and the cameramen and the people who did all the costumes and make-up and stuff. His lips moved when he read.

“Yes,” T. Jellaby said. “That old reverend’s son. Up the hill.”

“The one that’s got Dunnett’s boat?”

“That’s the one.”

“I could have told him a thing or two about she, if he’d have asked. But he didn’t ask me. He got a surveyor down. From Plymouth.”

“Old bugger’s knocking off Screwy Julie. You know. Down in Harmony Bay. Took her out today on that boat of his for a spot of jig-a-jig at sea. I watched them come in. Shagged out wasn’t the word for it. He must have had her from Christmas to breakfast time.”

“She’s getting past it,” Vic Toms said, putting a pound down on the counter. “I went over she last fall. There was rot in the stempost. I told old Dunnett to get an X-ray on them keelbolts. Then he gets this surveyor in from Plymouth. He comes along with an itsy-bitsy hammer … Won’t find nothing that way. Dunnett said to me how much he ought to ask for she. ‘Not a lot,’ I said. ‘Not a lot.’” He laughed.

“Eleven grand,” T. Jellaby said.

“That’s what Dad told him. But Dad didn’t know nothing about the rot. He only knowed she when she was Tremlett’s boat.”

“He only wants a floating knocking shop.”

“He better not knock too hard, then. Not with all that soft wood in the stempost.”

T. Jellaby snugged the pound note down in the till.

“What was the name of the bloke that directed “2001”? Has he made any more?”

“Search me,” T. Jellaby said.

After Vic Toms had gone, T. Jellaby realized that Captain Birdseye had given him an idea for a video. He often got ideas for videos, but if you wanted to get into the video game seriously, you had to have a gimmick. Nobody, so far as he knew, had used a boat before. Suppose there was this boat … with three girls … One of them would be very fat. She’d be called “Skipper”. And they’d run it as a regular floating knocking shop. For old blokes, why not? One at a time. Like ocean cruises. The girls would dress up like sailors, in striped jerseys and bell-bottom trousers, then they’d strip off as soon as they were out of sight of land, and the old blokes, who thought they’d signed up for a trip round the bay, would go bananas with fright and lust.

It had definite possibilities. You could do a lot with the sea … Just when they were making the old bloke come, you’d cut to crashing waves and foam and that. It’d be artistic. Like if the fat girl, Skipper, went down on an old bloke, you could have a big wave crashing down over the front of the boat. Then there were all those ropes. They’d come in handy. The three of them could tie up the old bloke and flog him in the sun.

Nice. The trouble with most videos was they looked plain sordid. This one would be different. Healthy, open air stuff, with plenty of sea spray and sunsets. T. Jellaby had started on a video last year — a modest effort with Tracey Pengelly and the Blazeby kid from the estate in a big foam bath — but he’d run into problems with the lighting of it. The lighting on this one would be a dead cinch.

Of course, you’d have to lens it in the summer and make out that it was in the Caribbean or the Med. The beach at Par could double for the Cote D’Azur on a sunny day. You’d just need some French signs around the place. And the girls would have to look brown … there was one in St Austell, half Indian, who was exactly the right colour. According to Mick Walsh, she was the town bike. “Skipper” would take more thinking about. Fat, definitely, but not blowsy. T. Jellaby saw a great smooth bum and the sort of cleavage that made you want to drop ice lollies in there. But tasteful. Like something carved in marble.

The really hard ones to find would be the old blokes themselves. It was obvious how they should look — straw boaters, blazers, canes, cricket trousers (would spats be a bit over the top? You could have some fun with spats) and crocodile-skin shoes. The tricky part would be to get the right kind of bloke to say yes. Maybe you shouldn’t tell them what you had in mind until it was too late — then the story in the video would be for real. T. Jellaby had to laugh when he saw the crazed old buggers being taken apart by Skipper and her crew, starkers except for their bright red espadrilles, with the boat rolling about somewhere off Dodman Point.

As he locked up the shop, he was daydreaming in titles. “Pussy Ahoy” … a bit crude, that. It needed something more innocent and frolicky. “Saucy Sailors” was closer to it. “Wet Dreams” was good, but too subtle. He rather liked the sound of “The Good Ship Naughty”. To be going on with, anyway. As for the boat, that Calliope would be just the job. But Captain Birdseye was a standoffish old fart, and T. Jellaby had his doubts as to whether he’d come in, in return for a slice of the action.

Harmony Cottage was out at sea. Diana felt the floor roll away under her feet and steadied herself by leaning on a joist as her kitchen tilted and yawed. She was landsick. She loaded a tray with Alka Seltzer, mineral water, a glass of hot milk and a thriller by Dick Francis that she thought she hadn’t read before, and carried it gingerly up to the bedroom. What did they call the stairs on ships? Companionways. Companion-less, she scaled her steep, uncarpeted companionway.

The wind blew all night and the rain came in sharp squalls, making the lagoon outside her window sound as if it was coming up to the boil. She had read the Dick Francis before. Her dreams were scrambled: there were jellyfish in them, foreign voices, creaming waves, a car chase along an aerial expressway in which her mother was driving and Diana lay in the back seat in a foetal crouch. She woke abruptly with a frown on her face, with the early birds.

She breakfasted on yoghurt and cigarettes, stubbing out the butts in the emptied carton. When the radio woke up too, she listened to a man reciting wheat and fatstock prices. Then the weather forecast for shipping came on. For the first time ever, she paid attention to the metrical litany of the sea areas. Dogger, Fisher, German Bight … Sole, Lundy, Fastnet … Shannon, Bailey, Malin, Rockall … She didn’t know where any of them were, but there was wild weather in them all: gales, severe gales, storms force ten. She found these warnings exciting. They translated for her into seas as torn and racing as the bilious sky overhead, with matchwood arks being hurled from crest to crest. When the man went on to read the proper news, about picket lines, abducted children and foreign wars, it sounded irrelevant and remote. When he said the word “summit”, she saw it as the frothy peak of an enormous tumbling wave.

At 8.30, gumbooted against the wet, she pushed open the kitchen door and had to lean on the wind to get out of the house. The garden was a drenched and sullen tangle; the stream had turned overnight into a full-blown river, the colour of weak cocoa. It had broken loose from Diana’s artful conduit and was pouring straight down the side of the hill. Close to the beach, with its rim of dirty scud, it fanned out over a delta of grey shale. Diana paddled across it to the car. She got halfway up the track before the rear wheels started to spin in the soft mud and the bonnet went hunting right and left as the car put down its roots and refused to budge.

It was raining again. She ran down the hill, slipping and sliding, with the wind blowing her skirt up into her face and the rain stinging her wrists. When she reached the kitchen door she was laughing out loud, high on the gale and on her night of damaged sleep. Looking back, she saw she’d left the car door open. The wind was catching it and the stranded car, like a shiny black slug, looked as if it was feebly signalling for help.

Why had she tried to drive to the village in the first place? She couldn’t remember. She felt stupid, soaked and happy. Something had happened; exactly what she couldn’t place, but it was to do with the sea, and it was as if all the separate bits of the world had been shaken and rearranged while she’d clung to the rope strap in the wheelhouse and the combers had come bulging up behind. Diana felt lighter, somehow more possible, than she’d done for an age. The only pity, she thought, surprising herself, was that George wasn’t around. It would have been nice to come upon him at the wheel in the sitting room, piloting the cottage through the turbulent morning; this navigator who always knew where he was, her new foulweather friend.

Foulweather Friend. It was a title. It would certainly work as a refrain. It had been a million years since Diana had found words fitting themselves to musical phrases in her head. Raking the wood ash out of the grate, feeling pleasantly silly, she experimented with foulweather friend. When she’d been in the business, her voice was a choirboy treble; it had sunk to contralto in real life, but the voice inside her skull was still fine and high. Melody Maker always used to call it “famished”, but Diana thought of it as just prettily slim. She lit the Calor Gas poker under a fresh pile of damp logs.

In Biscay and the German Bight,

Malin, Hebrides and Wight,

I’m counting on you.

(Can I count on you,

My foulweather friend?)

She conjured a lot of oom-pah in the bass and fluting, Severe Gale sounds from the woodwind section. Pine smoke ballooned from the fire.

Nutzo. Still, that was one of the consolations of living alone; there was no-one to catch you out being childish. Or hackneyed.

I’m feeling blue.

(Don’t know about you,

My foulweather friend.)

Then the telephone rang. Apparently George had caught her out. She put on her gruff gardening voice to cover her tracks. But it wasn’t George; it was Verity Caine.

“One teeny favour, darling, if you’ve got a moment …” Verity Caine tinkled on like a stuck shop bell; Diana drew a small boat on the Truro telephone directory.

You had to go through the operator to reach Montedor. Even Guinea-Bissau was on the direct dialling system now, but the antique Portuguese telephone equipment of Bom Porto was beyond the reach of modern communications technology. Vera’s phone had a handle on it that you had to wind round and round when you made outgoing calls, and George was afraid that an incoming one from England might throw the instrument into a fit of hysteria. Nevertheless, he rang the international operator and gave him Vera’s number. There was an unpromising silence on the other end.

“It’s in Africa,” George said.

“Modena, Monarco, Montana, Monte Cristo, Montego Bay, Montenegro, two Montereys and four, no five, Montezumas. Sorry. I’ve got you. Montedor.”

“That’s the one.”

“One minute, caller,” the operator said, with unwise optimism, George thought. Ten minutes later, after a wide variety of clicks, dialling tones and voices on crossed lines, the operator said, “Lousy weather. What’s it like down there, caller?”

“Very windy,” George said.

“And that doesn’t help.” There was the sound of a ringing bell somewhere half-way across the world. “We were going down to Weston-super-Mare this weekend. Looks as if that trip is going to be rained off.”

“Oh, what a shame.” It didn’t sound at all like Vera’s bell.

“I’m going to try re-routing you now.”

“Yes, do that.”

“There’s nothing worse, is there? A wet weekend with kids on your hands and the wife sick …”

“Can’t you lock them up in a cinema?” George said.

“One’s ten months, one’s twenty, and the other’s three. I’d like to see the Gaumont after they’d been through it. They’d beat the Blitz. Oh, hello, Senegal! Is that Senegal? This is Bristol, Youkay. We’re trying to reach a number in Montedor. That’s Mike Oscar November Tango Echo Delta Oscar Romeo. Mon-tee-dor.”

“Monte-dor,” George interrupted for Senegal’s benefit.

There were more clicks, followed by a noise like a brush fire. Then a clear voice came through, American in accent but African in its glottal warmth and depth. “We have congestion on all lines to Montedor. You try one other day, Bristol-Youkay.”

“Thank you, Senegal. Did you follow that, caller? Congestion. Like my wife’s trouble.”

“Well,” George said, “thanks for trying, anyway.”

On the quay, T. Jellaby was sitting in the passenger seat of his van. He was eating cheese and pickle sandwiches for lunch and studying the boats as they bumped and rolled on their moorings. He had, as he found it necessary to admit to himself, a pretty fertile imagination — well, more fertile than most, anyway — but those boats … you only had to look at them for ideas to come faster than you could handle them. He stared at the cross-trees on their masts. That was obvious, of course. But there were things you could do with winches, for instance, that would boggle your mind. He bit deep into his last sandwich. That was something else he must remember to tell Mum: lately she’d been going a bit too easy on the cayenne pepper.