Foreign Land

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Stretched barefoot on the starboard hand settee, George dozed and read and dozed again. Briquettes of charcoal whispered in the brassbound stove on the bulkhead; the fenders belched and sighed as the gale shunted the boats around against the quay. Away from the ancestors, away from the bureau drawers full of his father’s papers and from the faint, mothball smell of his mother’s widowed life, George was happily far out at sea. Captains kept him company: he dipped into Captain Slocum, he followed Captain Cook into the Pacific, he listened to the wind in his own rigging as Captain McWhirr drove stolidly for the eye of the typhoon. He re-read The Riddle of the Sands for the first time since he was thirteen. Galebound himself, all George required of a book was that it had the sea in it, and he read these voyages as impatiently as if they were thrillers. They piled up in the saloon, their pages splayed on the teak floor. When George slept in the boat he was a crucial eighteen inches — a whole world — away from Cornwall; when he dreamed, as he did almost continuously, the horizon was always empty and enormous.

It wasn’t the first time that he’d run away to sea. George was an old hand at this game. In May of ’43, when he’d been sitting his exams for School Cert, he had prayed for the war to go on long enough for him to get into the Navy. He grew more anxious at each new advance of the Allies. There was another, undeclared war on then, between Mr Churchill and G. P. N. Grey’s first gold stripe. It was a close-run thing between George and Admiral Doenitz as to who was keenest to keep the U-Boat fleet on station in the Atlantic. All George wanted was the view from the bridge of some dumpy little corvette on convoy duty, with the sea high and the sound of the engines broken by the monotonous pinging of the Asdic. He didn’t want to kill anyone — he hated the messing about with—303 rifles and Bren guns that went on every Saturday morning in the school O.T.C.. He just ached to take ship.

His father, of course, wanted George to go into the Army. Denys Ferguson Grey had spent the Great War as a chaplain in Poperinghe, and he still enjoyed being called “Padre” by his more military parishioners. He had never learned to swim; though rather a fat man, he had the kind of weighty bulk that looked as if it was designed to sink. You only had to see him in a bathing suit to imagine him going straight down in a stream of bubbles. Whenever George thought of the sea, it seemed to him a kindly place mainly because he imagined himself floating away on it leaving his unbuoyant father stranded on the beach.

On summer holidays, first in Dawlish, then in Ilfracombe, Mr Grey led his family to this dangerous element like Moses going at the head of the Israelites on their passage through the wilderness. In his old school boater and black and burgundy striped swimming costume, he made strangers look up from their deck chairs and snigger. He always carried an upended prawn net like an episcopal staff. George’s mother walked six paces behind him with the picnic hamper (an aeon later, in Aden, George realized that his mother was a model Arab wife); George himself skulked twenty, thirty, forty yards behind, and did his best to announce to the world that he was in no way related to the odd couple ahead. Hands deep in the pockets of his long short trousers, he put on his Edward G. Robinson scowl, kicked moodily at the sand and kept his eyes on the horizon, where colliers and cruise liners left their smoky prints upon the sky.

“Oh, do buck up, old boy, for heaven’s sake! Stop loitering!” his father shouted, and George, aged eleven, would slowly turn his head and peer behind him, searching the beach for the truant child of the fat man in the straw hat.

Mr Grey had no more liking for the sea than he had for charabancs, garlic or flappers. He found it disorderly and vulgar. But year after year he visited it — in much the same spirit as he visited the sick; a regrettable duty whose chief merit was that it chastened the soul. When he retired to the seaside, and not just to the seaside but to a house called Thalassa no less, he must, George thought, have been carrying his holiday principle to its logical, dutiful conclusion.

Now he remembered his father bending shortsightedly over a rockpool. Mr Grey was parting the oarweed with the cane of the prawn net. “Blenny,” he said. Then, “Starfish”. Then, “Anemone”. It was as if by naming each sea animal he could rob it of further interest. When the oarweed closed back on the pool, it was like the curtain coming down at the end of a play; the story was over, it was time to go home.

On the cliff path back to the hotel, his father took the same melancholy pleasure in pointing out the fossils embedded in the soft grey limestone. Every few yards he would tap the rock with the prawn net and say “Hmm? Hmm? What do you make of that?”

“Ammonite,” George said, and the tribe of three was allowed to move on a little further up the cliff. The handle of the net rattled on the rock again. “Trilobites,” George said; but his father had found the flaky remains of yet another prehistoric something.

“Old bullets,” George said and giggled, hoping to make his mother giggle too. “Oliver Cromwell’s toenails.”

“Lipsticks!” his mother said, and laughed at herself for daring to say such a thing.

“Belemnite guards, old boy, belemnite guards.” His father gave a weary sniff. There was so much silliness around in the world today; was there, the sniff asked, any need to add to it?

Seven years later, George got away to sea. At least, he had got as far as the requisitioned Butlin’s holiday camp at Pwllheli, where he apprenticed himself to Commander Prynne and had already got drunk, twice. He was both on the run from his father and trying to beat his father at his father’s own game. All through his childhood he’d been licked hollow by his father — at fossils, at names of the English Kings and Queens, at Greek mythology and the county cricket scores. (Denys Grey was solid for Worcestershire, so George, who hated cricket, was credited with a passionate loyalty to the fortunes of Surrey, the one county for which his father expressed complete contempt and which he always referred to as “Surburbery”.) After each tea-table defeat, his father would put on his most polite and inquiring voice to ask: “I do sometimes wonder, old boy, if they teach you anything at all, nowadays, at public school?”

Well, George was learning a thing or two at Pwllheli. His father could bloody well keep Harold Larwood and the belemnite guards; for George now had cocked hats, starsights, distances-off, bowlines and tidal streams. On his first weekend leave he came back to the Rectory with his new sextant, Tyrrell’s Principles of Marine Navigation and Volume 3 of the Admiralty Sight Reduction Tables.

On Saturday morning George set out his books conspicuously on the dining table. His father watched him from over the top of The Times. “Swotting?” He let out a little whistle of disdain. If you had to swot on a Saturday, you must be a pretty dim bunny, by his father’s lights.

“We’ve got a Nav. test next week.”

“I suppose it’s all done by numbers nowadays, is it? Maths was never my strong point.” His father went back to his paper.

“You have to get into the top five to make the Nav. Officers’ course. Otherwise it’ll just be Deck for me.”

“The Whitaker boy … what’sisname?”

“Nick?”

“Yes. He’s doing awfully well. In North Africa, now. With Monty. His father says he’s up for his third pip.”

At Matins on Sunday, George’s father preached on a text from Ephesians. “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called.” George sat with his mother in the seventh pew from the front.

All through the Confession, the Te Deum and the Creed, George was wishing that he’d worn his uniform. On the far side of the aisle, Colin Mansell, a flight lieutenant in Bomber Command, was stealing all the thunder reserved for our boys on their home leaves. Girls who wouldn’t spare a second glance for George were favouring Mansell with shy stares. His boiled face still lumpy with acne, Mansell wore the pious smirk of the returning hero, squared his shoulders and joined in the singing of “Now Thank We All Our God” in a voice designed to carry to the most distant of his admirers.

Then the Rector was up in the pulpit, framed by the blue banner of the Women’s Institute, and George listened to him speaking with the odd feeling that this Sunday’s text had been chosen as a private code between father and son. It was — wasn’t it — the Navy that his father was talking about? When the Rector said “vocation”, George knew exactly what he meant — it was the North Atlantic, the nightwatch, the line of pencilled positions marching across the empty chart.

“Today,” his father said, his voice booming in the rafters, “that word vocation has a special meaning for us as we approach the end of yet another year of war, and come to terms once again this Advent with the unfamiliar callings of war. Many of us in this parish have loved ones fighting — some held as prisoners — in foreign lands; men, and women too, who are indeed walking worthy in ways that those of us who are left at home may find it hard to accept or comprehend …”

Was that what he had really meant when he had peered disdainfully at the Admiralty Sight Reduction Tables? And was he now using the pulpit to say all the fatherlike things that he somehow couldn’t say over the dining table? Hopefully, uncertainly, George searched his father’s face, willing his father to meet his own gaze. But the Rector refused to be drawn: he went on addressing the flaky duck-egg paint on the church ceiling, telling it old, over-rehearsed home truths about duty, honour, love and labour (which the Rector called “getting one’s nose down to the grindstone”). George had lost him. He was like the big trout that always got away the moment you thought you had him hooked.

In the pew in front, Vivienne Beale was leaning forward, her woollen coat stretched excitingly tight around the slender stalk of her back. George worked out exactly where the elastic yoke of her bra-straps was hidden under the wool. He thought he detected a tiny lump, just to the left of her spine, where the fiddly hooks and eyes joined up. After last year’s Harvest Supper & Dance, she’d let George slide his hand inside her blouse, but she’d wriggled away when his fingers found a wired and bolstered nipple. At Pwllheli, he’d got as far as Number 4 with a girl called Judith Pugh. Received wisdom had it that once you’d made 5, you were as good as home to 10; and Judith Pugh had the reputation of being a real goer. George reckoned that he stood a damned good chance of not being a virgin by the time he came back for his next leave. Everything would look different then.

“In Saint Paul’s words, we must forbear one another in love …” The Rector was beginning to wind down now. George, moving with extreme caution, crossed his legs to hide his hard-on.

“And now, to-Gahd-the-Father-Gahd-the-Son-and-Gahd-the-Holyghost …” His father, like a fat bride in his surplice, swung to face the altar as the congregation came to their feet and George rose, crippled; his knees bent, chest thrust forward, clasped hands shielding his delinquent pelvic section. “Beallhonourandglory, nowandevershallbe, worldwithoutendamen-hymnnumber …” By the time the organ started up on “Jerusalem My Happy Home”, George was able to stand upright.

His father drove him to the station in the car that his mother called Horace the Morris. On the windy platform, his father said, “Well … best of luck with the exam, then. Do hope you make the, ah, Navigation course.” George was surprised, and pleased too, that he’d remembered. When the train came in, though, they shook hands like strangers. “Try and remember to write to your mother, will you? It means a lot to her.” Did that mean it meant a lot to him as well, or did it mean that it was the sort of boring thing that was only of interest to women? George couldn’t tell.

The slow train to Crewe was unheated. To start with he had the compartment to himself, where he sat huddled by the window in his stiff blue greatcoat. He tried and failed to read the Lilliput that he’d bought at Wyman’s. He stared out of the window, fogging the glass, and watched the rolls of thick steam from the engine blot out the sodden countryside. There was steam in the compartment, too; cold, acrid, bowel-smelling. He made a list of all the things that he might have said to his parents but hadn’t. He saw himself as the life and soul of the Rectory; his father beaming with pride, his mother full of earnest questions. Then he thought that he would probably be killed at sea. He imagined Mrs Norris from the post office bringing the telegram up the Rectory drive on her bicycle. There’d be a memorial service at the church, and Vivienne Beale would be there, dressed in black lace (including suspenders), head bowed, weeping quietly behind her veil.

“We never knew how brave he was,” his father said.

“I did,” said Vivienne Beale quietly. Then she whispered — she had told no-one this, not even her own mother—“I am carrying his child.”

At Didcot, a man got into George’s compartment. He was, George thought, rather too well dressed to be travelling in Third. He settled himself on the seat opposite, looked across at George and said, “Going back to your ship?”

On one side of the compartment, below the sagging hammock of the luggage rack, was a gouache of Weymouth seafront before the war; on the other was a cartoon of a bullet-headed German snooper with the caption, “Remember — WALLS HAVE EARS”.

In his best officer-of-the-watch voice, George said: “Shouldn’t you know better than to ask a damnfool question like that?” It sounded good, said out loud; a pretty stiff reproof.

The man, who was old, forty at least, said, “Sorry I spoke,” and laughed. “You don’t mind if I light my pipe, do you?”

George stared pointedly at Oxfordshire and said, “Not in the least,” in a way that made it plain as daylight that he minded very much indeed. The man shrugged, smiled, lit up and read — or rather pretended to read — a book with a yellow cover. He looked a thoroughly slimy type. As the train pulled out of Stafford station he went off to the bog at the end of the carriage and George was able to take a close look at the chap’s reading matter. It was called The State in Theory and Practice, and it was published by the Left Book Club. The man was obviously a bolshie — a bloody fifth columnist for Uncle Joe.

Trundling up England alone with a spy, George felt humbled by the thought of his own heroic and secret destiny. Eyeing his reflection in the darkening train window, he was torn between pity and admiration for himself. He was going to sea. He was going to take command of men. And putting yourself in the path of trackless torpedos was no Sunday School picnic. If the torp had your name on it … His eyes stung from the smoke from the bolshevik’s pipe.

When Rowley was killed in France in 1940, it had been a thrilling event. The Head talked of Rowley’s Supreme Sacrifice and of how he had Laid Down His Life For etcetera. The school had been granted a special Free Half to mark the shell that had blown Rowley to bits at Gravelines. George, in the Lower Fifth then, had felt a connection with Rowley so close that it was the next best thing to seeing your own name go up on the painted Ave atque Vale board in chapel. He’d been Rowley’s fag. Indeed Rowley, an amiable and rather lazy house monitor, had given George his old brass fly box at the end of his last term, and George still fished with Rowley’s black gnats and Rowley’s Tup’s Indispensables. The day that Rowley was killed was a day of almost unbearable personal glory for George Grey. That night he wept over Rowley’s death and was proud of his tears, those outward and visible signs of a very proper manly grief within. Eight more Old Vigornians had been killed in action since then, but none of their deaths had been a patch on Rowley’s.

Three and a half years on, of course, with every chance of making the Supreme Sacrifice oneself, things looked a bit different. George wasn’t afraid of dying, exactly (the face in the window, framed by a turned-up collar of heavy naval serge, looked not at all unlike that of David Niven in “The Charge of the Light Brigade”); the big question was what the hell one thought one was going to die for. Not “England”. Not “King and Country”. Maybe some chaps really had gone over the top in the First War with thoughts like that in their heads. It might have been possible before Dunkirk, even; perhaps Rowley (who liked poetry and had once declaimed “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion” to George, which was pretty bloody excruciating at the time) could have done it. But it wouldn’t wash in 1943. Suppose you did go down in the Western Approaches, who would you be thinking of as your legs went numb in the water, or you tried to struggle free of your burning uniform? The conchies? The bolshies? People like Mrs Atherton who’d pulled a wangle to keep her son out of the Army? The Altarwomen’s Guild? The Rector’s sermons? Commander Prynne? Judith Pugh? It was like having a five pound note and only being able to buy a packet of Woodbines with it. If you were going to lay down your life, your one and only, you ought to be able to spend it on something that was actually worth having. If the bolshevik hadn’t been sitting opposite, George could very easily have found himself crying at the thought of what a bloody miserable tragedy it would be, to go to sea and die a virgin.

By 2230, he was on the branch line from Macchynleth to Pwllheli, where the railway ran along the shore and the sea itself was suddenly there at his elbow; sleek, black, rippled like moleskin. He loved its mysterious, consoling breadth and emptiness. The sea was only really scarifying when you were inland. When you were on it, it was too absorbing for you to feel afraid of. Far out in the sky, there was the single white flash of a lighthouse. George timed it, counting off the seconds of darkness. A hundred-and-one, a hundred-and-two, a hundred-and-three … Twenty seconds. It was St Tudwal’s Island. Bardsey would be fifteen seconds, and there’d be five quick flashes. Even on a train, you could do some pretty useful navigation. He tried to find the Pole Star, but it was lost in the Welsh hills; so he guessed at where it probably was and used his watchdial to work out a rough bearing of about 296 on St Tudwal’s.

At Portmadoc, Ives joined the train. He’d come from Birkenhead by bus.

“How’s tricks?” George said.

“Shagged out,” Ives said. “And when I say shagged, mate, I mean shagged.”

“Did you have raids?”

“Her mother was away all weekend, wasn’t she? Staying with her aunt. In Southport. Oh, Southport, how I love you, how I love you, my dear old Southport!” Ives sang the words in his faulty baritone. The expression on his face was sickeningly smug. “Know how many frenchies I got through?” He held up the five fingers of one hand and three of the other. “I’m getting them wholesale now.”

George felt rotten. Admittedly Ives was twenty and had been a rating for eighteen months before getting on to the course at Pwllheli; but even so. He stared out of the train window at the wrinkled sea on which the unpatriotic lights of Criccieth were fretting. “Trust my luck,” he said in a drawl as broad as he could manage. “She’d got her monthlies.”

“It happens.” Ives sprawled on his seat, his short legs wide apart, his gas mask resting on his pelvis like a codpiece. “I knew I was all right. Know why? It was neap tides this weekend. She has hers at second springs. You could work out High Water Dover by her.” He took out a pack of cards from his greatcoat pocket and shuffled them. “Pennies up.”

For the rest of the way to Pwllheli, George was nagged by a single thought. Ives — even Ives, with his nasal accent and his fatty hands — had something worth dying for. That night, in the chalet which he shared with Pennington and Shuckburgh, he speculated for two long sleepless hours about his chances of doing it with Judith Pugh. Or Vivienne Beale.

Even in sleep George listened to the boat, feeling its creaks and grumbles as if they were happening somewhere in his own body. He wasn’t sure now if it was night or day, but he registered an uncomfortable series of taps on his tender ribcage. Damn it. One of the fenders must have come untied and a stray dinghy was bruising his paintwork. Muzzy-headed, his throat dry with sleep and old pipe smoke, he stumbled out on to the deck.

But there was no dinghy. The water on the port side of the boat was clear. George blinked at the wounding brightness of the ripples and searched for the log, or broken fishcrate, that had woken him. It seemed to be afternoon.

The log was … but it wasn’t a log, it was a body. Hanging half submerged in the sunny water, its knees and elbows were drawn up in front of it in the foetal position of a slumbering child. It rolled away on a wavelet, and came back. George heard it knock — a hesitant rap on the planks — before it turned slowly in the sea, so like a sleeper, and lay face down, a sodden mohair skirt ballooning round its plump, unnaturally white thighs.

George’s first impulse was to make it a blundering apology. Oh — I say — I’m most dreadfully sorry. It was like opening a lavatory door and finding a woman sitting there at stool. But there was no hasty slamming of the door on this one. The body was knocking again. Rat-a-tat-tat. May I come in?

Feeling stunned and nauseous, George unpacked his new braided mooring rope from the locker in the cockpit, and set out to lassoo the thing. Without success. The rope floated. Each time he tried to snare the body with it, the rope passed clean over the top, grazing the thing’s face. It was a horrible job. The face was so alive with astonishment that for a moment George wondered if it wasn’t a body at all, just a swimmer, bewildered to find herself being fished for like this by a strange man on a boat. But the eyes were very dead, wide open behind an opaque mauve glaze.

He had another go, reaching down over the boat’s side and looping the rope first under the head, then round the stiff crook of an elbow. He made a slip knot and tightened it. The body was far too heavy to pull out of the water. If he tied the rope to the end of the main halyard and wound it up on the winch … but that seemed an indignity too gross to inflict. At least for now. And he wasn’t sure that the bent arm would be stiff enough to stand the strain: he saw the body dropping from the shrouds with an incriminating splash. He looked at his watch. It was 4.50, and the fishermen would be in soon. If he left it here, it would be crushed against his beam when the scallop boats tied up alongside. As gently as he could, he towed it round to Calliope’s stern. Twice, he heard its head bump against the hull. “Oh, Christ, I’m sorry,” he said aloud, and made his awful visitor fast to the rail.

It was only when he was in the phone box at the end of the quay and dialling 999 that George realized that he and the body had been introduced. It was at the Walpoles’ Christmas party, and the body had been knowledgeable about the drought in the Sahel region. The body worked part-time for Oxfam.

“Emergency. Which service do you want?” the operator said.

“Police,” George said. “And ambulance.”

“Which do you want first?”

“Police.”

What was her name? Biddy something? No. It was … like Winny, or Binnie, or …

“St Cadix Police Station. PC Lofts.”

“It’s Connie Lisle,” George said.

At noon on Sunday in the Royal St Cadix Yacht Club, even old Freddie Corquordale was wearing the face that he kept in reserve for Test Match defeats and sudden bereavements. The only member who was out of step was Edgar Crosthwait, a rare visitor from Lostwithiel, who was deaf and hadn’t caught on.

“There’s no way around it as far as I can see,” Denis Wright said. “They’re going to have to call a spade a spade and bring in a straight suicide verdict. If only she hadn’t left that ruddy note.”

“You know where she’s supposed to have gone in?” said Rupert Walpole. “Off the end of Number 8 Dock. One of the girls in the office saw her standing there for about half an hour.”

“What’s the drop there? Fifty feet?” asked Freddie Corquordale.

“Oh no, more like fifteen. She went in at high water.”

Edgar Crosthwait was nodding vigorously and saying “Yes!”, “Yes!” at frequent intervals, his excellent false teeth phrased in an ingratiating grin. When he did manage to get down to the Club he prided himself on being able to rub along pretty easily with the other chaps there; today they all seemed a bit liverish for some reason. Edgar Crosthwait was listening to see if he could find a handy way in for his story about the rhino and the canoe. He’d told that a couple of times at his other club in Newquay, where it had gone down extremely well; he was fairly certain that it would be a new one on the St Cadix chaps. At present though, they seemed stuck firmly in the groove of talking about the launch of some boat or other, and he couldn’t see an opening anywhere.

“She must have been in the river for three days, just going up and down with the tide,” said Denis Wright.

“One just wishes that she’d said something,” said Betty Castle. The spring sunshine revealed how thinly her spiky hair grew on her pink skull. “I’m afraid the trouble with poor Connie was that she was a bottler-up. It never does any good, that. I know.”

“From what I’ve heard, she said a hell of a lot too much. In that note.” Brigadier Eliot glowered at Edgar Crosthwait, who chuckled, nodded and said Yes! three times.

The note which Connie Lisle had left on her dining-room table in a sealed white envelope under a candlestick had been passed by the police to the coroner’s office. It might just as well have been published in the Truro Times. Everyone knew what was in it. It was not, in any usual sense of the term, a note at all; it was a long essay. According to Mrs Downes, it ran to more than fifteen closely-typed pages. Connie Lisle had (in Mrs Downes’s word) “expatiated” on the emptiness of her retirement and her feelings of personal futility since she’d lost her job and moved to Cornwall. This was perfectly acceptable: Connie Lisle simply had never pulled her weight in St Cadix and, as you make the bed you lie on, so she had made herself a very hard and narrow bed. What wasn’t in the least acceptable was the second part of the so-called note, in which Connie Lisle had gone on to vilify (“That really is the only word for it”) St Cadix. Mrs Downes rattled off the phrase “topheavy, snobbish, inward and unreal” with an incredulous, dry smile; but she lowered her voice to an appalled whisper for “Dying can’t be so difficult when you spend every day in the company of the living dead.” It was Laura Nash, though, who put the kibosh on it. She was afraid that, tragically, certain names were named and some very ungrateful and very thoughtless things were said.

By throwing herself off the end of Number 8 Dock in her mohair skirt (“You might think she’d at least have had the decency to wear slacks for the occasion”) Miss Lisle had committed an act of cowardly betrayal. For in that leap, Miss Lisle had sneered at the Club, sneered at the Lifeboat and Cancer funds, at the Preservation Committee (which had halted the spread of council houses across the cliff), at the reefer evenings and the black tie dinners. She had sneered at the view from one’s first-floor picture window and at the posted and stiled Smugglers’ Trail, on which one took one’s dogs in the mornings.

George stood on the awkward outskirts of the group at the bar, sipping at a schooner of fino sherry. He rather disliked its thin wormwood and gall taste, but the drink seemed right for the day. He had expected St Cadix to rally round and sympathize with him over the beastly experience of fishing up Connie Lisle’s corpse, but it hadn’t turned out like that. It felt rather as if he’d been spotted coming out of a brothel. Everyone, even Rupert Walpole, seemed to be keeping a measured distance from him. It was Rupert, in fact, who, when George came into the bar, had said, “Oh — hullo, George. Aren’t you off yet?” Some sympathy. The Yacht Club was behaving like the Greeks who shot the messenger.

What the hell had he been expected to do? Prod the body with a boathook and push it out into the tide?

“Nasty thing for George there.” Denis Wright’s meaning was aggressively plain: George had touched pitch and been defiled.

He meant to stand his ground. “Yes. It was awful. I barely knew her, of course, but she seemed a nice woman.” Who else here knew or cared a damn about the drought in the Sahel?

“Poor girl.” Betty Castle was putting herself on George’s side. “I do so wish she’d talked to me. There was so much one could have done. If only one had been allowed.”

Verity Caine said: “I’m afraid she was never really right for Cornwall. Connie’s trouble was that she didn’t have any proper outside interests. She’d have been a great deal happier, I think, if she’d stayed on in Southend.”

“Oh, is that where she came from?” Freddie Corquordale said. “Ah. Southend.” As if that explained everything.

To Verity Caine, George said: “I don’t think that’s quite fair. She worked for Oxfam. She was surprisingly knowledgeable, really, about Africa.”

“Africa!” said Edgar Crosthwait, seizing his chance like a trout arrowing up to a floating fly. “Your patch?”

“Ah … yes, in fact,” George said, embarrassed to find himself singled out by the old booby in the pepper and salt tweeds.

“Funny you should bring up Africa,” Crosthwait roared. “I don’t know whether you had much to do with rhinos in your time out there?”

“That was a bad go.” It was the man from the television shop. Jellaby. He was standing on the quay at high water, holding the remains of a sandwich in one hand. “Must’ve given you a turn.”

“Yes,” George said from the deck of the boat. “It’s sad.” He meant the words to sound final, but Jellaby took them as an invitation. “Mind?” he said, turning his back to George and positioning himself lugubriously on the dock ladder. Jellaby was a very fat young man: the seat of his cavalry twill trousers was worn to a high shine, and the essence of Jellaby seemed to be concentrated in his broad, bland and self-important bum. George resentfully watched the bum descending to eye level. Jellaby eased himself over the rail and steadied his bulk against the shrouds. He was panting slightly.

“Nice one,” he said, looking over Calliope. “Lovely job.”

“Well, I like her,” George said. Needlessly he began to coil a warp of rope on the foredeck.

“Though she must cost you a bit in maintenance,” Jellaby said.

With each coil George twisted the rope away from him with a flick of the wrist to free it of kinks. He didn’t feel inclined to discuss his finances with the man from the TV shop.

“Bad as keeping a wife,” Jellaby said pleasantly, licking a crumb from his fingers. “Or a mistress.”

George went on coiling.

“Ever thought of going into the charter business?”

“No.”

“It’s an idea.” Jellaby parked his most distinguished feature on the edge of the coachroof. “You could defray a few expenses that way.”

George had come to the end of the rope. He searched the boat for something else to do and found nothing.

“Of course,” Jellaby said, “after what’s happened …” He shook his head.

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Well. People might get the wrong idea. There’s a lot of superstition around still. Especially to do with the sea. And a boat that’s had a drowning … some people might think that was on the unlucky side.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, you know better, don’t you? Same as me. No, I reckon your best bet would be with the film companies. They’re always out for locations. It’s money for jam. You’d get … oh, I’d say about a hundred pounds a day. That’s what they call a facility fee.”

“Really.”

“Straight up. You’d provide the fuel, of course. And you’d be the skipper.”

George stared at Jellaby. The bovine appearance of the man was a long way out of kilter with George’s notions of what a drug smuggler might look like. He would never have guessed that Jellaby was one: he looked far too poor and far too stupid. But, come to that, he didn’t look capable of running a TV shop either.

Jellaby saw that George was definitely interested.

“What sort of electrics have you got on here, then?”

“Twelve volts,” George said, lost.

“With an alternator?”

“Yes, in fact.”

“Oh, well, you can’t go wrong.” Jellaby brought himself slowly to his feet. It was like watching a marquee go up in a small garden in a high wind. “Mind if I take a decko at the … accommodations?”

“I’m extremely busy at present,” George said, shaking the coiled rope out over the deck and starting in on it from the other end.

“It won’t take a mo.”

“I’d be awfully glad if you didn’t. If you don’t mind.” George felt his cheek muscles go stiff with fury at the man’s impervious bloody crassness.

Jellaby looked suddenly and horribly wise. “Ah.” He grinned, opening his lips to disclose an unappealing collection of gunmetal fillings. He must have been a very greedy little boy. His mouth was like a memorial to the gallons of ice cream and hundredweights of chocolate that had passed that way. “You got company.” He nodded knowingly at the roof of the forecabin under his feet. “Some other time, then.”

“Yes. If you would be so kind. Some other time altogether.”

Jellaby looked at George in much the same way, George thought, as he might stare expectantly at a Black Forest Gateau, his face prematurely lit by the prospect of a big impending pleasure. “Well,” he said, “be seeing you,” and hauled his rude bum up the slippery ladder.

Diana parked her car askew on the quay and visited the boat with a string bag of grapes, oranges, bananas and a pineapple, as if George was ill in hospital. He kissed her on both cheeks. Her skin tasted moister, more substantial than when he’d seen her last. She smelled like a stranger, and he realized that he missed the powerful, baconfatty perfume of her cigarettes.

It was at Diana’s suggestion that he cut the drawstring of the bag and slung it like a hammock from two screweyes set in the overhead beams of the saloon. Scooping up fruit in handfuls from the settee, he settled them in the sagging mesh. He sniffed at the whiskery skin of the pineapple and put it on top like a crown.

“My horn of plenty.”

“Fruit keeps so much better if it’s properly aired,” Diana said.

And not only fruit, he thought. Her voice had changed too: it was lighter and rounder, with a clarinet-like tone that he hadn’t heard before — at least not since long ago, when she’d been a girl on the television. He looked at her, surprised. Her new healthiness was somehow offputting. It put her suddenly out of his reach.

“When are you off?”

“As soon as I see a window in the weather. There’s a low in Finisterre that I’m keeping an eye on. So long as it moves west … tomorrow, touch wood.”

“You don’t have to go to the inquest?”

“The police say not. They’ve got my written statement.”

“Did she have family?”

“There’s a sister, apparently. In Rotherham.”

“People are being absolute shits about her.”

“Yes, aren’t they?”

“Do you think they’re making up that note as they go along? None of it sounds right to me.”

George said: “Why would they want to do that?”

“It’s heavensent, isn’t it? An opportunity for everyone to say all the things they’d never dare to say for themselves. According to Willa Geach, the note says St Cadix was snobbish and exclusive, but Cynthia Dunnett is going round saying that Connie Lisle found us all too vulgar for words. I must say, it’d be pretty hellish if Cynthia Dunnett didn’t find one vulgar. I hope she found you vulgar when you were buying their boat.”

“Yes, she put on rather a good act of taking me for a door-to-door brush salesman.”

“It makes me envious. All this running away to sea.”

“What — me and poor old Connie Lisle?”

“Yes. You and she both.” Diana smiled. There was real wistfulness in her face too; but it was not, George thought a little sadly, a wistfulness for him at all — it was all for the boat as it sashayed gently on the ends of its ropes.

“I’d … love it if you came as well …” he said. The moment he spoke the words, they sounded importunate, too much.

“It’s a sweet idea.” Diana laughed, meaning no.

George thought: I always did lose my biggest fish.

Still nothing from Vera. Twice, George tried to reach Montedor on the phone and got no further than a crackly line to Senegal. He searched the small paragraphs at the bottoms of the Foreign News pages in The Times. There was no mention of Bom Porto. Late in the afternoon, he started to dial the number of the Montedorian consulate in Lisbon (there wasn’t one in London), but gave up halfway through. 010, 351 (but what could he say?); 29, 7 (“Excuse me, but have you had a recent coup?”); 6, 8 … He dropped the receiver back on its cradle. The single forlorn ping of the bell rang in the empty house.

At 5.50, the shipping forecast gave the low in Finisterre as moving slowly east and deepening. You can say that again, George thought, feeling the pressure in the air sinking round him as he listened. Perhaps he should go anyway. Maybe a testing gale was just what he needed. Indeed, as endings went, there were worse ways of going than being lost at sea. He poured himself two thumbs of whisky and watched the estuary below darken from grey to black.

The Cornish night silence was damp and deadly. The whisky made George’s throat burn. He found his mind working too fast and fruitfully for comfort as he gathered socks and shirts from his mother’s rosewood dressing table.

Out in the dark he could see soldiers. They stood on the corner of the Rua Kwame Nkruma, the tips of their cigarettes glowing, submachine guns slung from their shoulders, beery laughter in their wild, boys’ faces. Peres’s divisions. And Peres himself would be at his desk in the Presidium of the People, the chest and armpits of his battledress shirt black with fresh sweat. He was drinking 7-Up straight from the can and writing out his orders on sheets of school graph paper.

Anyone would be scared at the sight of Peres’s handwriting. From a distance, it looked gap-toothed; then you saw that it was a jumble of little letters mixed up with big ones. The e’s and n’s and p’s were sometimes the right way round, sometimes reversed. The Little Sisters of Mercy hadn’t made a very good job of Peres, the scowling thug in the back row of their mission school in São Felipe. Yet Peres, who could barely write at all, loved writing. He had the relentless output of a romantic novelist. From Peres’s office came plans, memoranda, surveys, orders, dreams, fictions. The three male secretaries whom Peres called his sergeant majors did their best with their boss’s peculiar orthography; but even after the documents had been typed and tidied, you could still see Peres’s vandal script in every line. They were full of capitalized words: REGENERATION, PURIFICATION, DISCIPLINE, NECESSITY. For five years, George had grown used to glancing at them, wincing, tearing them up and consigning their pieces to the office bin. Was anyone daring to tear them up now?

For what else was one to make of Vera’s missing letters and the dead connections on the telephone? Listening to Senegal failing to raise Montedor, George heard Peres in the wires, and hated him as a rival. For Bom Porto was his, George’s. It was precious to him as England had never been. It was too little, too delicate, too private, to survive Peres’s handling. George had once seen the man spell liberation as . At the time, it had been a joke. He’d shown it to Teddy at the Club as a rich example of how one of Peres’s damaged words exactly fitted Peres’s damaged notion of its meaning. Give Peres power, though, and the man would mangle the country in just the same way as he mangled the language. One day, you’d ring up and there wouldn’t be a Montedor to get through to. Peres could make it disappear, as letters and words disappeared from shopfronts and signposts, eroded away by vandalism and the weather. The shape of the harbour, the spiky mountains, the leftover Portuguese trellises and balconies — they’d still be there, but they wouldn’t be Montedor. They’d be another country, as alien as Iran or the Philippines. Had it happened already? Was George having no luck with his phone calls because the international operator had been right first time and there was now just a blank space between Monte Cristo and Montego Bay?

Discarding an old lace-fronted dress shirt that laundering had turned to the colour of ivory, he felt helpless, shaky. It was if someone with a rubber was methodically trying to erase the world one lived in: Teddy was almost gone; Vera was going fast; the bunkering station was now little more than a few vestigial pencil lines. George knew who was doing it. Peres. It had to be Peres. That was the only possible explanation as far as he could fathom. Seeing Peres’s khaki, Creole face, smelling his minty breath, George hated him for a persecutor and a thief.

He tried to soothe himself. Thoughts like this were bad for his heart. Remember Vera’s warnings — her alarm at his morning sweatiness, her nagging talk of Dr Ferraz. George thought: but I don’t have Vera to worry for me now; I’m on my own lookout. He rolled up the tie that she’d brought back from the conference in São Paulo (“the closest thing I find for you to a living rainbow”), and bedded it down between his shirts.

There was a blast from a baritone ship’s siren below the window. A coaster was sliding past, lighting up the water as she went. Eight thousand tons, or thereabouts; and she was riding low, a damned sight too close to her Tropical line. The siren sounded again, full of the self-importance of having somewhere to go. Like every ship on its way out of the estuary nowadays, she made George feel left behind.

A hairpin fell out of a pair of boxer shorts as he lifted them from the drawer — his mother’s. This was how things came full circle. Soon everything female in his life would be his mother’s again. It was like being six, to find one’s mother’s scent in one’s clothes, and odd maternal souvenirs lurking in one’s underwear. He half expected to hear himself scolded for crumpling his shirts into balls instead of folding them. His parents — provident as always — had taken care when dying to leave enough of themselves to last George through his own lifetime: hairpins here, pictures there, postcards, hats and papers. In his first week in St Cadix, he’d had to throw out his father’s old pipes because he didn’t want to find himself smoking them by accident. Out of tobacco one Sunday, he had raided an ancient tin of his father’s: the stuff had flared in the bowl and burned like wood shavings, its dusty, rectorish taste taking him back fifty years in a breath.

He opened, and quickly closed, another drawer full of trinket boxes.

“Do you think this brooch goes with my organdie, dear?” His mother was talking to his father, who, as usual, wasn’t listening. “Dear?”

“Very nice, dear,” his father said in the patient voice that he kept specially for talking to women and children.

“What does George think?”

“Oh — tophole,” said George at ten, from deep in the Aeromodellers’ Monthly; and came swooping back like a glider falling out of a thermal to his glass of Chivas Regal and his carrier bag of linen.

His parents were more alive, more real to him now, than he was to himself. They had some sort of knack, a staying power, that George had failed to inherit. Thalassa bulged with them, while he still tiptoed round it like a weekend guest. Their past was intact (how did they manage it?) while George’s felt as if it was crumbling from under him so fast that he couldn’t even count its going. As for the future … George saw that as the period covered by the next shipping forecast. It didn’t look bright, either, the way things were looking now. South, veering southwest, six to gale eight. Visibility moderate, becoming poor later. Rain later. Something of that order. Certainly not a future that anyone could take much comfort from.

On the way downstairs, George found himself being chided by his father.

“I do wish you’d stop moping round this house like a sick cat,” his father said.

“There’s a pain in my back,” George said. “My heart’s giving out warning signals. I’m not a well man.”

“If you want something to keep you occupied, you can always deliver some parish magazines. Or give your mother a hand, for a change.”

“Yes, Daddy,” George said, squeezing rudely past his father on the landing.

He cooked himself a rubbery omelette in his mother’s kitchen, on his mother’s pan, and drank the remains of one of his own bottles of Vinho Verde.

“That’s not what I’d call a proper meal at all,” his mother said.

“Wine? On top of whisky?” his father said.

“Will you leave me alone, for Christ’s sake? I am sixty years old.”

“The boy’s drunk,” his father said.

“He’s just going through a phase,” said his mother.

“There are certain levels of behaviour that I simply will not tolerate in this house,” his father said.

George rid himself of them by folding The Times back on the crossword and getting out his pen; “Vessel goes astern in some Liverpool sea shanty (5)” was obviously “sloop”, and “Philosopher uses box, in emergency (8)” was “Socrates”. He got “castigate” and “pythons” before he heard his parents’ voices again, coming from behind the closed door of the drawing room.

“Heaven knows what they’re going to make of that young man in the Navy,” his father said.

“It’s adolescence, dear,” his mother said.

At 9.00, George rang Diana. He wanted to invite himself round for a drink. He wanted to invite her to come with him on the boat — only as far as Plymouth, of course. Or Dartmouth. For a day or two, to see how she liked it. But her voice on the phone was surprised and already sleepy. George coughed, and said that he was leaving the key to the house under a brick.

“I’ll look in when I go past and pick up your mail.”

“I’d be awfully glad if you would.”

“It’s no trouble at all. When will you get to London?”

“Oh — ten days, a fortnight. It depends on the weather.”

“Ring me up and tell me where you are … when you’re in port.”

“Will do,” George said.

“You wouldn’t like a drink … sort of now, would you? Before you go?”

“Oh …” George said, playing for time, waiting for the invitation to solidify. “It’s a bit on the late side … isn’t it?”

“I guess so … with your early start.”

“I really meant—”

“Take care. Watch out for Arthur. Have a lovely trip. I’ll be thinking of you.”

“’f you too,” George said, swallowing, and found that Diana had hung up before he’d spoken.

Putting the phone down, he noticed his face reflected in the dark uncurtained window. It was in ghostly monochrome, like a photographic negative. What was upsetting was that, at first glance, it wasn’t his own face. The hair and beard were his, but not the plummeting cheekbones, the sunken eye sockets, the ridged and bony temples, the fishlike downturn of the lips. They were his father’s. Worse, they were his father’s, not at sixty but on the day that George had last seen him, when the rector was seventy-nine and was already confined to the upstairs bedroom, where he kept a baby’s hours of sleep broken by weeping complaints.

“Come … to … the … station,” he’d said, in his new voice that sounded like dead leaves blowing across stone.

“What?” George had bent close. “What is it — Daddy?”

“Constipation,” the rector whispered. “It’s just this … ruddy … constipation.”

George, finding himself nearer to his father than he’d ever been before, quickly kissed him. It was only on the forehead and the kiss was no more than a graze of the lips. His father’s skull felt as fragile as a speckled blackbird’s egg. But the rector’s eyes were shocked, helpless, accusing. They followed George as if the kiss had been an indecent assault.

That was the face — the face he’d kissed — that he saw in the window. Fascinated, appalled, he studied it, turning his head slowly in the bare electric light. The resemblance faded out of the reflection. It was just a trick of the uneven glass and the darkness outside. There was no more real likeness than there was in the pictures of the ancestors on the walls. It was the Grey family cheekbones that he’d seen — no more. Even so, it gave him the jitters. He’d never realized that he would ever look so old, or so much his father’s son.

At 10.00 George, middling drunk now, locked the dark house and pushed the key under the brick. He would have liked to have left a note, but couldn’t think of anyone to leave a note for. Not even the milkman called at Thalassa. Holsum-hatted (H LS M — M CA’S # B D: “What is that gibberish on the boy’s head,” his father said), carrying Vera’s oilcloth bag of many colours, he padded out through the soggy mulch of pine needles. The house frowned at his back.

The night was damp and windless. The sea at the foot of the cliff was inaudible, the branches of the trees overhead quite still. It was the deceptive calm that you expected before a gale came roaring out of the southwest. It deadened the village, making it feel like something preserved in jelly.

Most of the houses were as dark as his own, still waiting for the summer visitors who rented them furnished by the week. For weeks people had been talking about The Visitors, in the same tone that they would have used to say The Russians or The Chinese. But no Visitors had come yet. At least none that George had seen.

In a very few windows, the curtains were splashed with blue light from the televisions inside. The only voices on Upper Marine Walk were American ones talking too loudly about love and death with the tinny vowels of speak-your-weight machines.

At the bottom of the hill there was a noisy pool of pop music from the jukebox in The Falcon’s Nest and the bleep and chatter of wargames in the bar. George kept to the shadows on the far side of the street. He’d always thought of pubs as friendly places in whose foggy undemanding gloom a man could safely talk to himself and nurse his bruises. But you’d have to feel very good about yourself to face The Falcon’s Nest with its wolfish motorbikes on the pavement outside and its angry racket within.

The man from the TV shop — Jellaby — was there, a baggy, albino figure under a sodium streetlamp. He was propositioning a girl almost as fat as himself in motorcycle leather gear.

George heard the girl say, “Cash?” and saw Jellaby raise his open palms under the lamp. “Anyway you want it, flower,” Jellaby said. “Or I could cut you in on a percentage.” He spotted George. “Evening, squire! Off on your travels then?” He laughed. George cringed and let out a small hiccup on the salty, hamburger-and-chip-smelling air.

“Goonight,” George said, trying to cover the hiccup.

“Don’t forget now, squire!”

How squalid and graceless it was, this strange village England of the young, where a man like Jellaby was at home and George was in resentful exile. Walking on, grateful for the darkness of the empty street between the padlocked aquarium and the soft Queen Anne brick of the old custom house, George thought of Africa: the statue of Dr Da Silva in the square, spraygunned with Vivas; the silver band under loops of fairylights; the couples dancing beyond a fringe of dry acacia trees. He saw a man, taller than the rest, easing his way through the crowd. Hi, Mister George. He couldn’t believe it-it felt so bloody long ago, as far away as childhood itself.

He reached the quay wall and leaned for a moment against its black bulk, feeling the granite against his cheek. The silhouettes of the scallop dredgers were rigidly still on their moorings, their masts and derricks forming a complicated cuneiform inscription on the water beyond. For a moment, he saw them as tuna boats, jostling abreast, waiting their turn to discharge at the Frigorifico.

“Hey, Mister?”

The voice seemed to come more from inside his head than out of it. He thought, Christ, I’m drunker than I realized.

“Mister? Please? Where is the red lights place?”

George saw, or thought he saw, the Creole face of a boy in his twenties. His thin nylon shirt looked far too skimpy for a March night. His head barely came up to George’s chest.

“Donde voce?” George said, his voice wobbly with drink.

“Cabo Verde, o senhor.”

“Cabo Verde? What are you doing here?” It was like being able to sing, to find words of Portuguese back in his mouth again.

“I am working on a German ship. I am a deckhand. We came in tonight. My brother also is with me. He stays aboard now, to study.”

“Your brother is a good boy,” George said. “You should be studying too, not out sniffing after whores.”

“Make a favour, sir, but I—”

“Which town in Cabo Verde? Which island?”

“Mindelo. São Vicente.”

“Mindelo? But that is marvellous! I know Mindelo.” He put his arm round the boy’s shoulder, hugging him. He felt so bony and frozen in his pitiable shirt that George was afraid for him. Stupid boy. He remembered an old jacket down in one of the hanging lockers in the saloon; the boy could have that — it’d be a bit big, but better than nothing. He thought there was a guernsey somewhere, too. Bloody German shipowners — the boy’s wages would be laughable, and what little money he had would probably be all mailed home to Mindelo.

“I am from Bom Porto. Montedor.”

The boy stared up at him for a moment, and giggled nervously as if George had cracked an incomprehensible joke.

“We’re neighbours, you see. Do you know Bom Porto?”

“Yes, sir, I have visited there.”

“When was that?”

“Two, three years ago.”

“I was there. Your ship refuelled in Bom Porto? I expect you saw me. Remember the bunkering station? That was me. What was the name of the ship?”

“It is a long time. I do not remember.”

“I never forget a ship,” George said. “A German ship, was it? Tarmstedt? Nordholz? Katerina?”

“I do not know.” The boy stared down at his black plastic shoregoing shoes.

“Never mind,” George said. “It is too cold to remember things. What you need is something warm to put on. You are not in Mindelo now, you know; you are in England. It is a very frigid place. You must have proper clothes.”

“I am not too cold, sir.”

“Nonsense. Come down to my boat, and I will find you some English clothes. Then you can go to look for your girl.”

“I am obliged sir, but it is not necessary.”

“Idiot! I want you to have them. What is your name?”

“Paulo Joaquim Pedeira.”

“Well, Paulo Joaquim, I am George.”

“Yes, sir.” He slipped George’s grasp with a fluttering wriggle, like a scared bird. Poor bloody kid. Europe must have accustomed him to expecting only kicks from strangers. Now he stood frowning at the water, his waif’s body topped by a fantastical bush of wiry hair; an exotic tropical plant on a dull Cornish quayside.

“Here—” George said, holding out Vera’s bag. “You take this, and I will go down the ladder first. What do you like to drink? Whisky? A beer?”

The boy didn’t move. He stared at George, his lips moving soundlessly like an actor rehearsing. Then he said, “Excuse me, sir, for a favour, but I do not like to bum-fuck.”

“NO! NO! NO! I do not ask you down for that! That is not what I mean at all!”

“There is a boy on the ship. A German boy. With white skin and white hair. He will do it for some money. I will speak to him, if you wish, sir.”

“No!” George shouted from a swirl of nausea in his chest.

“I apologize, sir, but it is late, and I must find a woman.”

Brokenly, George said, “But you must have a jacket — something for the cold …”

“Boa noite, o senhor.” And he was walking, at a trot, towards the custom house.

“Paulo Joaquim!”

The footsteps on the stone paused for a moment.

“You make a left turn,” George called. “Go up a little hill. There is a bar there. The Falcon’s Nest. Ask for a man called Mr Jellaby. Jellaby. He will find you a woman.”

The boy’s voice came thinly back on the still air. “Jay … Lay … Bee? Muito obrigado, o senhor.”

He lay on his berth in the forecabin of Calliope, under a pile of threadbare naval blankets. They were the same blankets that had once gone to make up Sheila’s infant cot in Aden, and it seemed to George that some faint, sweetish scent of her babyhood still clung to them. He fingered a torn corner just above his left eye, and remembered how she had used to chew on it for comfort. When he’d put the light on in her room, he’d watched her face suddenly convert from tearful panic to a sly and toothy smile. He could have sworn that she was winking at him.

“All in order, Number One?” George said.

“Gog,” said Sheila. “Gog. Gog. Gog,” and held out her arms to be lifted from the cot.

He’d left the transistor radio switched on to catch the shipping forecast at 0015, and the oil lamp over his head was still burning, making the cramped cabin bigger with its shadows. George opened a book. It was an old Bom Porto favourite, James Agate’s Ego II, but the light from the lamp was too erratic and George himself too shaken to follow those funny reviews of dead plays. He had a go at listening to the voices on “Today In Parliament”. They were talking about rate capping, but he didn’t have the faintest idea of what rate capping was. So he lay under the blankets studying the insides of his eyelids and waiting for the people on the wireless to say something that he understood.

Gale or no gale, he’d go. Whatever the weather. It felt like a bitter lifetime since he’d climbed on to the plane in Bom Porto, yet he still hadn’t managed to actually arrive in England. Going to sea, he might — just might — manage to come home.

Under the blankets, George set sail up-Channel. The wind was a brisk northwester, a wind to blow the cobwebs out of any man’s soul. England slid smoothly by on the beam, a rim of violet coast no thicker than a pencil line. It grew as he closed with it — turned into sculpted woodland, castles, church towers, cliffs of chalk … a warm and welcoming water-colour England, its seagoing counties laid out in a bright patchwork. Under engine now, he motored deep up creeks and dropped his hook in the rivery shade of village elms, where he lay in secret, watching the lights in the water and listening to the voices on the shore. Off Portland Bill, he weathered a small, convenient gale. George was brave and elated as the boat tumbled in the waves, its deck streaming with green water, its timbers slamming. She could take it. She’d look after him. Then, becalmed, he lay to anchor in the Downs, where the sea was trapped like a pond behind the Goodwin Sands.

The lamp overhead flickered. The light changed to a greasy, streaky sort of dawn, with Dover an elongated smudge on the port quarter, and the tide running fast under the boat, spilling it out into the North Sea. George, his pipe drawing nicely, swung on the wheel, bringing the wind hard on his sails, and steered for London. The sea was now broken and littered with traffic. At first, George saw tea clippers, Thames barges and trading schooners under full sail: on closer inspection they resolved into container carriers, lumpy coasters, oil tankers and roll-on roll-off ferries as big as apartment blocks, with Calliope bouncing about in their wakes like a discarded bottle.

Blue water turned to brown and the flatlands of Kent and Essex came suddenly in close, with marshes, cooling towers and the icy glint of passing cars on wide and windy roads. George went out on deck, lowered his sails and took up position in the long upriver cavalcade. Gravesend. Tilbury. Greenhithe. Dartford. Ships, wharves and warehouses crowded around the boat. The air was meaty with the smells of coal dust, tar and cinnamon. Shirt-sleeved longshoremen unloaded cotton bales from an open hold and watching faces stared from high windows.

The packed city slowly opened to include him. Things fell into place as his twin masts fitted themselves among London’s myriad of masts, cranes, spars and funnels. He was enfolded at last by a world he understood — a world which in its turn comprehended George.

Somewhere up there round a bend in the river past Greenwich Reach, there was a dripping lock-gate waiting to receive him. There were figures on the dockside; his clever daughter, her pregnancy as rounded and firm as an apple, and Tom beside her. They were waving. George too.

Yes. There was somewhere one could live. There must be a vacant patch of dock wall, crumbling, grassy, with a pair of rusty mooring rings to tie one’s life to. Snugged down with the barges and the lighters, he’d be a free and easy man in thermal underwear and old trousers. Maybe Calliope was a bit small to set up house in — well, he’d buy a Thames barge. But the thing to do was to keep floating. On land, it was too bloody easy to find oneself awash and sinking.

In Wapping (or was it Limehouse?), George walked with the sceptical, seamanlike roll of one who knows that the ground is always in danger of sliding away from under one’s feet. He was on good nodding terms with every lighterman. The clubbishly furnished saloon was untidy with books from the London Library. In his airy galley, he was learning to cook — real Elizabeth David sort of cookery. Soufflés, ragouts, things like that. Old Africa hands turned up at the dockside. (Take old George, the lucky bastard. Did just what he wanted. Happy as a clam down there on the river.) Up in the bows, Tom carpentered away with chisel and plane. And there was his grandchild. Pure mustard. It was Tom who said the boy looked just like George. No doubt about it this time: he’d sailed home.

George didn’t hear the shipping forecast. The radio played to an empty house. The complex low was drifting south to central Europe; a high was moving into Shannon. The wind, said the man on the wireless, would be from the north, force four to five. Visibility moderate. Good later.

George slept. The folds of sallow skin around his eye and cheek were drained of blood. His overlong grey hair was a limp tangle on the pillow. Only his beard had life in it. It was growing in the night, the white and ginger curls sprouting and twining like vegetable shoots under glass. A considerate trespasser, seeing that face and failing to hear the feeble gull-cries in the throat and chest, might have reached for the blanket (one corner of which was clenched in the man’s knobbly fist) and pulled it gently all the way up over the head.