Foreign Land

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Diana’s muddy car was parked outside Thalassa, its driver’s door open, its tyres sunk in pine needles. Diana had meant to stop only for as long as it took to pick up the mail, but she enjoyed being alone in other people’s houses and the car had already been standing there for more than ten minutes with the open door wagging in the wind.

Once upon a time Diana, on tour in strange cities, had made a habit of calling up estate agents and being shown round people’s homes on the pretence that she was looking for somewhere to live. She was always comforted by these trips, which she kept secret from her manager and the rest of the band. Sometimes there was the sad pleasure of being able to warm yourself for a little while in front of someone else’s family life: their stray Wellington boots, crumbs on tea tables, nappies drying on washing lines, the lingering smell of Vicks vapour rub. At other times there was a happy sense of recoil as you realized that you were glad, at least, that you didn’t live there, not like that.

George’s house was perfectly hideous, Diana thought. She felt cheered up no end by its horrible shuttered dustiness. There wasn’t anything of George’s in it at all, so far as she could see, unless one counted the TV set in whose curved screen she saw herself reflected as a jolly fat lady.

Nor was there any mail for him, to speak of. A telephone bill. A seed catalogue for Occupier. A very thin airmail letter. Diana looked at the stamp, which was pretty and extravagantly big. It showed a sword, a boat and a baobab tree. She put it away in her bag.

She lit a cigarette and restored the spent match to the box. She’d taken up smoking again, but it was as if there’d been a rift in an old friendship, and she and cigarettes were now on uneasy terms. The fat lady on the screen puffed smoke at her.

She wouldn’t have minded a drink. She poked about in all the likely places, but all she could find was some low-calorie tonic and the dregs of a bottle of Vinho Verde, so she settled herself in the bulbous and smelly buttonback chair and inspected the room.

A pair of kukris in burst leather scabbards hung on one wall. Withered palm crosses were stuck behind the pictures. As for the pictures themselves … they were freakish. They were portraits of the sort of people who should never have had their portraits painted in the first place.

A slug of white ash splashed on the knee of Diana’s jeans. She let it stay there, and returned the blank stare of His Honour Judge Samuel Wilson Grey Ll.B (Cantab) with a frown, for in the Judge’s face there was a faint — faintly displeasing — trace of George. It was something in the set of the jowls and cheekbones; something puzzling and indefinite like seeing (or did you just imagine it?) a stranger wink at you in a crowded room.

Behind the Judge’s head there was a sketchy landscape of mountains and temples. If you looked closely enough into the paint, you’d find tigers there. Diana felt suddenly irritable and lonely. She stubbed her cigarette out on an ugly brass tray that the Judge had probably brought home from India along with the kukris, and for a second it was like grinding the butt out on George.

What could you do with someone who was as ghostly as this? George was hardly more than a disturbance of the dust in the house. He was an ancestral cheekbone, a family mouth. Diana wanted to wound him back to life — to make him his own man — even her man, maybe. That hadn’t seemed too mad a thing to think a week ago, but the beastly house turned it into a laughable idea.

She pulled open a drawer in the Welsh dresser. It was stuffed to the top with papers. She opened another. The same. They all were. She picked up a sheet from the top of the drawer; it was a carbon copy of a letter to the Church Commissioners about roof repairs, poorly typed with a lot of x’ings-out. She burrowed through a layer of old Christmas cards, hunting for something private, personal, but in all this accumulation of yellowed paper there were just stiff politenesses and yours faithfullies. At the very bottom of the drawer there was a letter dated March 1944 and addressed to The Revd. D. Grey, The Rectory, Pound Lane, Tadfield, Hants. It was from the assistant manager of Lloyds Bank in Winchester and it wished to draw the Reverend’s attention to the fact that, following the presentation of cheque No. etcetera, his account was overdrawn to the tune of £4/5/8d.

The figures looked so fatuous. She stuffed the letter back inside the heap and pushed the drawer shut. Bits of paper stuck top and bottom. It looked flagrantly burgled, but Diana couldn’t be bothered to cover her tracks: she felt too impatient with these tiresome people — these Greys—who never threw anything away, who hoarded their roof repairs and cruddy little overdrafts and left them behind to their descendants as if they were history. It was unbearably pompous to treat your life like that. Diana liked to think of her own past, when she thought of it at all, as something contingent to herself, like the Foreign News page in the paper; a succession of small earthquakes in Chile. But when you looked at Thalassa, at these obsessively stored leavings, it was like kids making beastly little piles of their own snot and earwax.

A door banged upstairs. George! It banged again: it was only the wind. He must have left a window open. Pleased with this excuse to prowl further, Diana climbed the dark staircase.

A curtain in the bedroom was billowing into the room, its red velvet sopping and blackened with rain. She shut the window. The estuary was chipped and roughened and the sea at the entrance was sending up tall plumes of surf where it broke on the rocks. She thought, I wouldn’t like to be in George’s boat today; I’d be saying every Latin prayer I could remember. And some English ones, too.

The bedroom was a woman’s, not a man’s. A valance of frilly lace skirted the unmade bed. The only picture was a floral print of the kind you could buy at Woolworths. The manufacturers had printed it in relief to give the impression of whorls and ridges of oil paint. After the judges and bishops and lieutenant-colonels, it came as a bright surprise.

The tangle of blankets and cold sheets on the bed looked forlorn and widowed. A plastic bottle of Evian water stood on a sidetable, its top off, a drowned fly afloat on the surface film. At Diana’s feet there was a shirt crumpled into a ball. Without thinking, she picked it up to tidy it away. Her attention was caught by the label inside — she’d never have taken George for a man who had shirts specially hand-made for him. His name was sewn into the collar like a schoolboy’s. G. H. P. Grey. Folding the shirt, Diana saw herself for an idiotic moment as a matron in a prep school, and felt a twinge of irritation at George for having landed her with this part.

It was not for George but for the woman whose room this really was that she began to remake the bed, heaping the heavy blankets on the floor. It had been a very long time since anyone had bothered to plump the pillows: they were damp and flabby, their stuffing congealed into knots. She tossed them to one side and stared with a paralysed grin at the gun which she’d uncovered.

In thrillers, she thought, you’re supposed to recognize guns as celebrities. People are always turning round to face a Colt o38, or a something-Magnum, or a Smith & Wesson automatic. Your last memory is the brand name of the weapon that kills you. There was no putting a name to the gun on George’s bed. It was just a gun — and hardly even that, more like the sort of cap pistol with which G. H. P. Grey might run round making bangs in the garden. But it looked too heavy for its own good. It had left its greasy imprint on the threadbare cotton of the pillowcase. Like the Turin Shroud, Diana thought.

Even in LA she’d never known anyone who slept with a gun under their pillow. Who was George Grey thinking of killing in St Cadix? What kind of a man would you have to be to get any comfort from feeling a gun against your cheek at night through a layer of lumpy goosedown? And why had he left it behind? Had it been deliberately laid for her like a prize at the end of the paperchase?

She was half ashamed, half excited by her find. Her hands dithered as she replaced the pillow over the gun, matching the grease stains to the black metal. She shook out the shirt and crumpled it into a ball again. Taking her time, she rearranged the bed to make it look slept in and abandoned. When she’d finished, the room showed no sign of being disturbed, but the house was changed. It had a new centre of gravity. Everything now converged on the hidden gun — the frilly valance, the floral print, the terrible portraits, the Easter palms, the old letters. Diana had the sense that she was looking at it now through George’s own eyes; the squirm of alarm in her stomach belonged to him, not to her. Standing by the window, lighting a fresh “cigarette, she felt his hankering after the emptiness of the sea like an unexpected cramp or a stab of heartburn.

Diana liked secrets, and on the stairs she was lightheaded in her possession of this one. She would explore what it meant later. For now, there were two questions rolling in tandem in her head: did he have a licence for that thing? And what did the H and the P stand for?

“And hands that do dishes,” George mumbled in a growling bass, “will be soft as your face in mild green Fairy Liquid.” He’d picked up the jingle from the television like a germ and he couldn’t shake it off. It went round and round in his skull like a loop of tape.

Holding on tight to the varnished spokes of the wheel, his pipe clenched upside down between the tar-stained premolars on the port side of his jaw, he was in the swing of things.

Calliope soared, slid sideways, plunged and bucked, with a phosphorescent bulge of surf swelling against her lee side.

“And hands that do dishes …”

The haze had burned off. The stiffening wind was raising a lumpy sea and the sky was cold and empty except for a jet-trail breaking up high to the north.

“Will be soft as your face …”

He was taking the waves one by one, searching for the safest route up each low rockface of piled water. He could see the sun shining through the crests where the sea was as pale as lime juice before it spilled over into ragged white moustaches of foam.

“In mild green Fairy Liquid.”

His bedroom climbed the wave first, followed in short order by his drawing-room, his kitchen and his bathroom. Calliope splashed like a whale, raising a wall of bright spray as she toppled on a big one. Water streamed along the decks and down the wheelhouse windows. Now up, now down, now in the sun, now in the shade, he was being shaken about like a dice in a cup.

“And hands that do dishes will be soft as your face—”

The wheelhouse was snug, though. The air was warm and thick with pipesmoke, sweat, coffee and diesel; it was good companionable air, and George was happy in his den, inhaling his own exhaust fumes and watching the sea buckle and break outside. He was as safe as houses here. The rubberclad handbearing compass, worn round his neck like a medallion, bounced against his breastbone as Calliope rolled. He eased her down into the black trough.

“In mild green Fairy Liquid—”

His own brand of fairy liquid was racing past the hull; sudsy, tumbled, up to all sorts of magical tricks and passes. It reached for the stern of the boat and thrust him high up over the sea, a giant for an instant. Then it dwarfed him with a sudden giddying fall as the wave dissolved under his feet in a tissue of froth. George wasn’t frightened; at least not now, not in the wheelhouse, with the sun out and the waves grinning at him. Shifting the heavy rudder in its girdle of chains, he was in a trance of concentration, lost to himself, playing in tune.

When land showed, it was at first a faint stain, perhaps only a ledge of thin cirrus, between sky and water. George kept on losing it behind the wave tops. It was another half-hour before he trusted it not to disappear altogether, and a half-hour more before he could pick out the grey rhino rump of a headland, standing out a shade more firmly than the rest. Prawle Point? Bolt Head? He wasn’t sure and didn’t think it safe to leave the wheel to check the compass bearing of this doubtful land against the chart.

Making landfall, any landfall, had always been something to marvel over. George had half forgotten that peculiar twist of pleasure which went with seeing a new country come up from under the horizon. Everywhere looked so possible from out at sea. You could feel the whole ship quickening at the first sight of it: the little gangs of ratings out on the flight deck in the cold, the bridge filling, the funny hush as everyone strained to pick out a fresh detail invisible to his neighbour. Landfall was like a child’s Christmas — you woke up in the dark for it, alert after only an hour or two of sleep, and its slowly sharpening silhouette held out exactly the same kind of promise as the tantalizing bulges in the stocking at the end of the bed. Never mind for now that all the most exciting protuberances would turn out, in daylight, to be potatoes.

Hours before you were due to dock, before land was more than a hypothetical smudge, everyone was busy, borrowing sharp ties, fancy cufflinks, ten bob notes and names of bars where you could meet girls. Even the captain, arriving on the bridge rather too early to take over the wheel, failed to mask the foolish landfall smile that suddenly knocked ten years off his age.

George had first seen Montedor like this, in ’45, twenty years before he’d taken over from old Miller at the bunkering station. There was the smell of the African wind in the muggy dawn, and Hecla’s corkscrew motion as she waddled through a steep beam sea. The dusty cone of Mount Bobia was what you saw first — a lonely island, its top lost in cloud. Then the sky thickened behind it and turned into the sawtooth outline of the Sierra de la Canjombe.

Farley was standing beside him, elbows splayed on the rail, his face sunk in his hands. They watched together as the coast inched towards them and you could see the rim of surf breaking against an impossibly bright yellow beach. Farley passed George the binoculars, and eventually came out with what was on his miserable mind.

“All those nigger tarts … I suppose they’ve all got clap?”

“And syph,” George said. He was staring at the lighthouse on the end of Cabo Sao Giorgio. It didn’t look like a lighthouse at all: with its crucifix and slender spire it looked like a whitewashed Mediterranean Catholic church.

Devon now was just as foreign-looking as Montedor then: a bald, brown, humpbacked land, like a single lichenous rock in the middle of the sea. There were no signs of life out there, no evidence of natives, friendly or otherwise; just a rolling vegetable bareness, on which you might find yourself cast away like Robinson Crusoe. The waves were tamer here now that the boat was in the lee of the coast: six miles offshore, George was able to hand the wheel over to Lazy Mike and go out on deck to take a closer look at the country he’d discovered.

He stood on the coachroof in the warm red shadow of the mainsail, one arm locked round the mast, the other trying to keep the binoculars aimed at Devon. Mostly all they showed was blinding sky, then the torn lacework of the sea, as Calliope’s bows splashed down after another flying leap. But it was bloody marvellous, though. George had spray in his eyes and up his nose. The chest of his jersey was soaked through. He had to keep on using his binocular-hand to jam down the brim of his Holsum cap and stop it being blown away to France. Eventually he gave up on the binoculars and hung them round his neck. Giving himself to the powerful sweep and plummet of the foredeck, he let the land ahead come to him in its own good time.

Yes. There was a fan-shaped spill of colour in the dark cleft of a hillside over to the north-east, like a mess of dried paint on a palette with its shocking pinks and chlorophyll greens. George warmed to the sight of it. He loved those feckless shanty towns where people lived in cardboard boxes, old banana crates, kerosene drums, palm thatch and chickenwire. They kept starved goats and grew amazing flowers in dried milk tins. Ten minutes more, and one would catch the first whiff of their cooking fires, and see the women at the water’s edge, pinning out the laundry with stones to dry on the sand. Yes. Now he could smell the fires. Definitely. Woodsmoke. Burned palm oil. Dung. Coriander.

Calliope slammed into a breaking wave and George got a bucketful of sea in his face. He wiped his eyes with a sodden sleeve. When he looked up to find his shanty town again, it wasn’t there. Not that it made a damn of difference, really, that the shacks of the detribalized Wolofs were actually just holiday caravans. The basic principle and the colours were exactly the same. But it was funny about the smell. That had been as tangible as the salt water which was still stinging in his eyes.

He clambered back along the wet deck to the wheelhouse, where he reset the compass course on the autopilot. 125° would keep the boat prowling nicely south-eastwards in parallel with the coast. He loosened the sheets in the cockpit. With the wind behind her now, Calliope was freewheeling: she lolloped quietly along with the waves, taking the sea with an easy slouch.

George trained the binoculars on the shore. The sandstone cliffs swam, enlarged and slightly out of focus, in the glass. What he wanted was a church tower, or a gasholder, or a radio mast, or what the Admiralty chart called a Hotel (conspic). But the place was empty of landmarks. There was nothing to get a fix on in the blue shadows of its volcanic pleats and folds, its tufty trees, its wide heathlands of gorse and bracken, its pretty tumble of caravans on the hill. The land slid past at a steady four knots on the stream. George watched intently, trying to second-guess it, like an immigrant at a porthole looking anxiously out at his strange home.

There was a voice at his shoulder.

“There will be Kurds there, won’t there, darling? I’m simply dying to see the Kurds, aren’t you?”

He’d felt a blaze of relief and gratitude to Angela for the sweet way in which she’d said yes to the Aden job. He had expected tears, recriminations, icy silences, had steeled himself to be told that he was utterly insensitive, thoughtless and unkind. The marriage was fifteen months old and Angela was pregnant. George knew that Aden was too much to ask of her, even though the job did pay an amazing £1250 a year. He had put it to her so hesitantly that he was dismissing it from his own mind as he spoke. Yet she said yes. No questions. Just like that. It was a day or two later that he found out that Angela’s consent was based on the fond illusion (and George loved her for it) that Aden was the homeland of the Kurds.

After his demob., it seemed to him that he was the only person around who didn’t have a strong opinion about what George should do in civvy street. Angela had lots. “Georgie can be one of those men who go round the world collecting old carriage clocks for millionaires,” she announced at breakfast at the Haighs’. On successive days, she advised him to go in for theatrical management, estate agency, trick photography and the Bar. Finally she suggested that he might find work as a spy.

“Darling — how on earth do you think one’s supposed to become a spy, for heaven’s sake?”

“Well, you’d have to go and see someone in the Foreign Office, I should think,” she said, smoking a de Reszke cigarette and looking perfectly serious.

George’s father held out altogether gloomier prospects for his future. “I don’t know if you’ve thought of schoolteaching, old boy? You might just manage to get into that. Of course there’d be two years of college first, but I rather think you might be able to get one of those grants that they seem to be giving away to pretty well everybody now, under the Socialists.” He blew noisily through the dottle in his pipe. “The Whitaker boy, now … what’shisname?”

“I can’t remember,” George said, knowing perfectly well.

“Jeremy … Nicholas, something like that. Anyway, he’s doing awfully well for himself, so his father was telling me. Average adjuster. There’s a big future in Insurance, but of course you’d need a good head for figures for that one.”

It was one of his father’s dearly held fictions that George was incapable of adding two and two.

“What’s your view, er, Angela?” his father said.

Angela stared at him for a moment, her big eyes misty with boredom. “Oh, look!” she said. “You’ve got bluebells in your garden. Aren’t they ravishing?”

The job in Aden was Mr Haigh’s idea, of course. He knew a man who knew a man — and it was fixed. He waved away all George’s worries about Angela giving birth in the hot season four thousand miles away from home. “The sun’ll do her a world of good. And they love babies in naval hospitals; it makes a change from what they usually have to do with sailors.” As for the bunkering business, it was “You ought to know a bit about ships now — it’s just like being a sort of maritime petrol pump attendant.”

Angela celebrated the news by going shopping with Tanya Fox and Serena Lake-Williams. There was, she said, nothing-literally nothing — at Harrods, or Fortnum & Mason’s, or Peter Jones. “It’s too Cold Comfort Farm to be true.” Even so, she came back to Bolton Gardens with a white halo beret with a built-in veil (“for the mosquitoes”), a yellow rayon bathing costume, a striped parasol, sunglasses, three broderie anglaise maternity gowns, a patent water purifier, a white dinner jacket for George, turtle oil soap, orange skin food, and a tinned ham. She had placed an order for the early delivery of a Dunkley pram, and showed George a printed photograph of what looked like an open touring car circa 1908.

Mrs Haigh, looking at the things which Angela had bought, said, “You must have used a dreadful amount of coupons.

Where did you manage to find them, dear?”

“Oh …” Angela said vaguely, “you know … Tanny and Serena chipped in, bless them,” and George, watching her, was certain she was lying. When he tried on the dinner jacket for size, he had the uncomfortable sensation that he was handling stolen goods. It fitted perfectly: Angela was brilliant at that kind of thing.

Everyone, Angela said, madly envied their going overseas, and the glamour of Abroad became a fixed feature of herself, like her eyes and her fair hair. She called Aden “The East”; whenever she said the word, she inserted a short pause before it and lowered her voice a little. “Of course, when I’m in … The East …” she would say, and she had the knack of making you see her there; alone in a desert of sculpted dunes, at the head of a crocodile of native bearers carrying trunks on their heads. Hecla had actually stopped at Aden for a day the previous year, and George could remember the place as an untidy heap of hot cinders spilling out into the sea … some makeshift bungalows … and dwarfish men in ragged skirts pestering the sailors for baksheesh. When he heard Angela talk, he realized how much he must have missed. She was right, of course: it was entirely his fault that Aden had looked such a dump. You needed Angela’s imagination if you were going to see through the surface to the far Araby that lay behind. He even began to wonder if she might be right about the Kurds.

Her elation survived the sixteen-day passage on the RMS Queen Adelaide from Southampton en route to Bombay. The ship had been a luxury liner before the war, but she had been requisitioned as a troop carrier in 1939 and the accommodations were still pretty grim and soldierly. Angela was horribly seasick off Cape Finisterre, but she was jolly brave about it, lying all day in her bunk with a sweet white-faced smile and saying, “Please don’t worry about me, Georgie — you go off and have fun.”

It was George who behaved badly. He hated being a passenger and pined for the view from the bridge. He saw his chance when he found himself alone with the Second Officer at the bar.

“So you’ve found your sealegs?” the Second Officer said, as the floor sank suddenly away to port and the barman moved just in time to catch a flying soda siphon.

George explained that, in fact, he knew this patch of sea rather well. Last time he’d been on it, it had been worse than this. A steady Force 9 for nearly twenty-four hours. They’d come bloody close to losing an aircraft, and a gun-mounting on the starboard quarter had been swept clean away when they’d tried to make a turn for Brest and been caught beam-on.

The Second Officer smiled and turned to the barman. “You know what they say about the three most useless things you can have on a ship? A wheelbarrow, an umbrella and a naval man. What’s in that glass?”

“A pink gin,” George said, duly squashed.

The Captain organized a daily sweepstake in which the passengers bet on the distance run each noon. George took a lot of trouble over his estimates. He worked out the tidal streams as best he could from memory and guesswork. He enjoyed explaining to Angela how to make an independent measurement of the ship’s speed with a Dutchman’s Log. He made Angela stand on the promenade deck up at the bow, while he waited near the stern. When he waved his handkerchief, she dropped a cigarette packet over the side and he counted off the time in seconds, going “a-hundred-and-one, a-hundred-and-two, a-hundred-and-three” until the cigarette packet raced past him in a rush of foam. The foam was the problem. More often than not, he never spotted the cigarette packet. But it did work a couple of times, and George calculated that the Queen Adelaide was making a steady twelve and a half knots.

The odd thing was that, despite this careful science, George and Angela never won the sweepstake. He was always close, but there was always someone who was closer, like the old lady who was going out to see her grandchildren in Hyderabad, or the bald young man who was getting off at Suez to sell agricultural implements to the Egyptians. It occurred to George that the Captain might be cheating him of his prize on the grounds that George was a fellow professional and therefore ineligible for the competition.

At dinner one night he heard Angela saying to her neighbour, “Poor Georgie likes to pretend that he knows everything in the entire world about ships and navigation and things. After being in the Navy and all that. But between you, me and the gatepost, I don’t think he knows anything much at all.”

George grinned, said, “Ah, I was afraid I hadn’t fooled you, darling,” and devoted a great deal of attention to tearing his bread roll in half. The remark hurt, though, and he didn’t ask Angela to help him with the Dutchman’s Log again.

Within sight of the lights of Algiers, George, in pyjamas, went to Angela’s bunk. “Oh, sweetie — no. Think of the Baby.” So he lay alone, watching the lights fade slowly out in the dark sea, listening to the intimate wheeze of the ship’s engines and feeling frightened — of Angela, Aden, the baby, everything. Some mornings he woke up thinking that he had only dreamed his marriage. It was like that now. It was queer and scary to feel that you weren’t really related at all to the person who was sleeping just six feet away from you in the cabin. He could see the dim hump of her shoulder under the blanket. It didn’t look in the least bit wifely, somehow.

“Darling?”

The hump shifted a little as Angela moved more deeply into the bed towards the wall. He was sure she was awake. He would have liked to ask her if she was feeling frightened too.

In the Suez Canal, Angela said, “Oh, Georgie! Look — camels! Isn’t it just bliss?” She snuggled against him as they stood at the rail, watching the camels in silhouette on the levee like a cut-out paper frieze, and George, feeling proud and husbandly now, basked in the brilliance that Angela brought to things just by making herself a part of the picture.

They docked in Aden on May 11th. The temperature was in the high nineties, and they stepped ashore into a hot, wet, gassy wind, like the bad breath of a sperm whale. George was sick with apprehension for Angela as he looked out on ricketty roofs of corrugated iron, dusty boulders, mudbricks and starveling yellow dogs. Yet all she said was, “Do you see that man with his dagger? Sweet!”

The company had allocated them a bungalow on Steamer Point. Its previous tenants, trying to make themselves at home, had given it the character of a seedy boarding house in the English midlands. They had left greasy antimacassars on the chairbacks and some printed tablemats with pictures on them of the Oxford colleges. George noticed what looked like rat droppings on the sinkboard of the kitchen. He waited for the bomb to drop out of the bland blue tropical sky.

He said, “Darling, we only have to stick it out for … well, six months perhaps …” He tried to make six months sound hardly longer than a weekend, but the words came out with the cold ring of a prison sentence.

“Oh, Georgie, don’t be so feeble.”

For a week, George held his breath. It seemed to him that he was always watching Angela through a blue film of mosquito-mesh as she moved behind it, mysteriously purposeful in her white slacks and cherry-coloured blouse. It took her a day to destroy the hideous sitting-room, and George piled the furniture in the dirt road outside, from where it disappeared within minutes of its exile, seized by invisible hands. Returning at noon from his first full morning at the bunkering station, he found the bungalow swept clean and bare as a shell and Angela gone.

When she returned, her hair was caked with red dust and she was talking nineteen to the dozen. She’d been out with Abdurahman. Abdurahman? Abdurahman — silly! — was the camel driver who brought the water-carrier up the street every morning and evening. He’d taken her home and she’d met his cousins, sweeties, all of them, and their simply darling children. She’d gone into the women’s quarters and been dressed up as an Adeni bride, and she’d gone to the souk in Crater Town and bought tons of things for the house with Abdurahman’s help. Abdurahman would bring them later, with the water—

“Darling, don’t you think you ought to watch that a bit? I got a lecture from Wilkinson at the station this morning … about how one had to be careful about fratting—”

“Fratting!” Angela’s voice was piercing and contemptuous. “I’ve never heard anything so sickmakingly stuffy. You can do exactly as you please — you and ‘Wilkinson’, whoever ‘Wilkinson’ may be. But I shall frat and frat and frat and frat with anyone I want, and if little Georgie-Porgie thinks he’s going to stop me, little Georgie-Porgie has another think coming!”

George could hear the leaves in the single acacia tree beyond the verandah. They were chinking like coins in the wind. He said: “Wilkinson’s invited us over to his bungalow for dinner.”

Angela stared at him. She was smiling the way she always did before she burst out crying. “Well you can go, can’t you? I expect I’ll be having dinner with Abdurahman.”

George stood in front of her in the empty room, choked for words. He said “But” twice. He felt for his new pipe in the pocket of his jacket, and realized that he wasn’t wearing a jacket, only a sweat-soaked shirt, the rightful property of Mr Haigh. It was another moment or two before he noticed that it was not Angela who was crying this time, it was him. She was a sort of wobbling blur, and he could feel the cold trickle of tears on his cheeks.

“Oh don’t be such a baby,” Angela said.

“Sorry,” George said. “It’s just … hay fever. Haven’t had it for years.”

But she was placated. By the time that Abdurahman arrived with Angela’s purchases from the souk piled in twin baskets on his camel, she was her sweet self again, carolling with pleasure as she unpacked the bolsters, coloured rugs, squares of dyed silk, copper trays, joss sticks and the rough cotton headdresses that she said would be just perfect for tablecloths.

The transformation of the bungalow was extraordinary. George was dazzled by his wife’s genius. Where the dowdy lounge had been, Angela created what she called her majlis room, an airy, lamplit cave of cornflower and crimson, where one lolled on cushions on the floor and the walls were hung from floor to ceiling with striped rugs. Day by day, George’s house turned into the most exotic place he’d ever seen.

Mornings and afternoons he sat on an uncomfortable stool under a creaking fan in his prefabricated office at the bunkering station. He swapped ships about between the coal berths and the oiling berths. He wrote out dockets, yarned with Wilkinson and got used to clapping his hands and shouting “Shweyya! Shweyya!” at the Arab longshoremen. When he went home, though, it was to Angela’s Orient, a storybook world over which Angela now presided in a maternity smock and baggy silk pantaloons.

She was wonderful at populating it, too. They had arrived in Aden without introductions to anyone, unless you counted Wilkinson, which Angela certainly didn’t. By Empire Day, they knew everyone. At least Angela did. Often George got home to find a small herd of black Morris 8s tied up outside the bungalow and a cheerful crowd of Residency bachelors, visiting naval lieutenants and sappers with toothbrush moustaches within. They all called her “Angie”—a liberty that George had never taken — and several times George felt that his own entrance into the conversation was a dampener on things.

“Georgie!” Angela called from her cushioned warren of young men. “Kiss?” She tilted her cheek for him, and when he kissed her he saw the young men smile.

Sometimes, between the bridge evenings at the Club, and the blistering Friday beach picnics, and cocktails at the Residency, and bungalow parties up and down the length of Steamer Point, they did have the occasional week night to themselves, and George ached for these times when he and Angela could sprawl alone in the majlis room.

Copies of Vogue and the Tatler were beginning to arrive for Angela by slow seamail now. While George tried to teach himself to read and write Arabic out of a book, Angela read out snippets of news from home.

“Greta Garbo’s having a thing with Cecil Beaton.”

“Someone’s just opened a new oyster bar in Curzon Street.”

“Oh, look, there’s Lady Throckmorton with the Maharajah of Jaipur.”

The Dunkley pram came, vast and resplendent in a much labelled plywood packing case. He unveiled it for Angela, a surprise; but Angela wept when she saw it. Appalled, George cradled her.

“Oh, Georgie, I don’t want to have this beastly baby — not when I’m having such a lovely time.”

It was with pride and fascination that George watched the steady swelling of Angela’s pregnancy. Sometimes she allowed him to rub her with Lady Standing’s Rejuvenating Cream For Tired Faces And Hands. Spreading the cream over her belly with his fingers, he marvelled at her stretched skin, blue and shiny and hard as porcelain. During the seventh month, her navel turned inside out. George didn’t like to mention it, but this development intrigued him no end: it stood on top of the great mound of her womb like a sprig of holly on a Christmas cake. Once, he saw the skin quake and shudder as the baby kicked. Full of wonder, he put his lips to Angela’s oiled stomach.

She pulled her nightdress down over herself with an angry tug, hurting George’s cheek with her knuckles.

“Don’t! I’m so bloody ugly I want to die!”

Angela’s pains started in the middle of a dinner at the Residency. Billy Wilshawe drove them to the Naval Hospital, hooting all the way. George held Angela’s hand tightly and watched wild dogs scarpering from the jumpy beams of the headlights. At the hospital, she was taken away from him by a nurse and he was left by himself in a creaky wooden room full of rattan cane chairs and dog-eared magazines. The bare electric bulb was fly-specked, the yellow light came in fits and starts. Under the noise of the crickets outside, he could hear the hum-and-grumble of a generator in the grounds.

The nurse came back.

“It’s going to be a long time yet, Mr Grey. If I were you I’d go home and get some sleep.”

“Would you mind awfully if I kipped down here?”

“No. I’ll get you some blankets if you really want to, but you’d be much more comfortable at home.”

“I’d sooner stay. If that’s alright with you.” At ten, the nurse came back with a pile of hospital blankets and a mug of tea. At eleven, George went out on to the loggia, where he smoked a pipe and stared into the half-lit dusty courtyard. Someone had once planted a tree in the middle, but like most green things in Aden it had died. At midnight, he tried to read a magazine. It was tough going.

An Eton and Harrowing Tale

The warning to the public to bring its own

snacks to the ‘Varsity and Eton and Harrow

matches, coming on top of what we are told

about our bread, serves to emphasise the

sombre hue of our times …

He wasn’t sure whether it was supposed to be funny or not.

“Still up and about?” It was the nurse again. “You’re not going to be good for much in the morning, are you? Still, I’ve brought you a drop of brandy. Don’t drink it all at once — we’ve got quite enough on our hands without having to deal with sozzled fathers.”

“She is … all right … isn’t she?”

“She’s tophole. She’s sound asleep at present. Just like you ought to be, my lad.”

George measured out the quarter bottle of brandy at a fingernail an hour. He watched the dawn sky lighten to the colour of Parma violets and saw the kites wheeling high over Crater Town like scraps of burnt paper. At six, he heard singing — a soprano hitting a random selection of top notes — and realized that it was a moan of pain. He couldn’t tell how far away it was, but it didn’t sound at all like Angela. At seven, breakfast came on a tray.

“Sleep well? She’s doing fine. Not long to wait now.”

The morning lasted for days and weeks. People passed by the loggia, talking, busy, indifferent. George hated them. Angela was Having a Baby, yet the bread man stood by gossipping in Arabic with a ward orderly, a doctor in the uniform of the RAMC walked past whistling “Much Binding in the Marsh” and a dog was lifting its leg against a gatepost. He swallowed the last of the brandy. He wanted to go to the lavatory but didn’t dare, in case they needed him.

A few minutes after noon, George heard Angela scream. It was a scream in which the whole world seemed to curdle — a scream from which it seemed impossible that the screamer could survive. It was ragged, gasping, louder and louder, arching over the hospital into the sky. Clutching his head in his hands, George shuddered with it, as if the scream was inside him. He bit on his sleeve. Then there was silence. A landrover, misfiring on all five cylinders, went by on Hospital Road.

Drenched in sudden sweat, George thought, she’s dead. He stood in the corner of the room, hunched, his eyes covered, his head pressed against the hot wood. He felt someone touching him. Then he heard another horrible scream.

“It’s all right, dear. Don’t worry. She’s having nice big contractions now.”

The nurse was laughing at him.

He said: “It’s not … always like this?”

“Oh, yes, dear. It’s perfectly normal. It’s just Nature’s Way.”

“Oh, God,” George said, as Angela screamed again.

“It’s always the fathers who have the worst time of it. The mums just sail through.”

At 12.30, Angela’s bachelors piled out of a Morris 8 into the courtyard. Peter Moffatt. Alan Chalmers. Tony Flower. Bill Nesbit. Justin Quayle.

“Hello, George! Hasn’t she had it yet?”

“Don’t mind us, do you? Just thought we ought to turn out and show the flag.”

“I say, George, you look positively wrecked.”

“What’s the latest from the quacks?”

Angela screamed.

“Christ,” said Tony Flower.

Justin Quayle produced a packet of Players.

George shook his head wordlessly at the sight of the cigarettes. The bachelors lit up in silence, looking suddenly pale under their yellow tans.

“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Bill Nesbit said.

When Angela next screamed, Peter Moffatt put his arm round George’s shoulder and held him. George’s eyes were squashed shut. He was pressing into them with his fists.

“Bear up, George,” Peter Moffatt said. “They know what they’re doing. Pretty bloody, though, isn’t it? I had no idea. Tony — what about a spot of whisky for the wounded man?”

George sucked gratefully at the bottle. “Thanks so much. I suppose I’m being a b.f., really. The nurse seems to think so, anyway.”

“How long have you been on sentry-go?”

“Since 10 last night.”

“You should have roused out the chaps. We’d have sat it out with you. Bit bloody much having to face it all out on your own-i-o.”

“What are you going to call it, George?”

Angela screamed. The bachelors stood awkwardly at attention. When the sound died, George said, “Ah … Crispin … if it’s a … boy … or … ah, Sheila, you know …”

“Good-oh,” Tony Flower said. “I’ve got a brother called Crispin. The one who’s out in Sarawak, poor old bugger.”

“Well, there’ll be a lot of sloshing being done over at the Club tonight,” Alan Chalmers said. “Bags-I the job of making sure that George gets pissed out of his mind.”

“I suppose they’ll keep her in for a few days, for observation.”

“Bound to,” Justin Quayle said. “My sister had a baby last year, in Godalming. They kept her in for a fortnight, I think it was.”

“Boy or girl?” said Tony Flower.

“Boy. Pretty squalid little nipper, actually.”

The screams were coming at closer and closer intervals. The bachelors, battle-hardened now, sat around on the cane chairs, smoking and tugging at the knees of their trousers in embarrassment when they heard Angela cry out each new time. Bill Nesbit remembered that there was a pack of cards in the glove compartment of the car, so they played poker. Since no-one had any cash on them, they played for imaginary stakes. They bet their next year’s salaries and their parents’ houses in England. Peter Moffatt bet his sister’s virginity on a pair of tens, and lost it to George, who had a full house.

“To him that hath …” Justin Quayle said.

“The painting by Joshua Reynolds in the drawing-room. Six Chippendale chairs. And the Chinese vase thing on the hall table,” Bill Nesbit said.

“Pass,” said George, even though he’d been dealt a straight flush in diamonds.

At 4.00 in the afternoon if was Peter Moffatt who noticed the silence. “I wonder if that’s … it?” he said. Ten minutes later, a different nurse came out on to the loggia.

“It’s a girl.”

The bachelors whooped. “Sheila!” Peter Moffatt said, his arms round George. “Well done!”

“Well, which of you boys is the Daddy, then?”

The nurse looked surprised when George shambled forward, grinning helplessly. He followed her along the walkway, under a painted sign saying “X-Ray Unit” in War Department lettering.

“Just through here—”

The whitewashed room was cool and smelled of medicine. A flappy punkah fan was turning overhead, and Angela was lying back on the pillows, her face as colourless as putty. Pain had given her a sort of isolating celebrity, and George felt shy of touching her. He said, “Oh Christ, my darling.” The baby was in her arms, wrapped closely in a shawl. George gazed unbelievingly at his daughter. She was like an enormous wrinkled purple grub, not really human at all. He said: “She’s … wonderful.”

Angela said, in a strange, croaky voice, “Everyone was quite sweet.”

“Oh Christ,” George said, shaking his head to try and bring the world back in focus. “Was it terrible? Were you awfully frightened, darling?”

Angela smiled. She looked as if she found it difficult to make her lips move properly. And suddenly the room was full of bachelors. Tony Flower was the first to kiss her, and the bachelors were doing and saying all the things to Angela that George couldn’t do or say for love of her.

“Angie — you clever girl!”

“Isn’t she stunning!”

“She’s got Angie’s eyes!”

“I never knew you had it in you,” Justin Quayle said, staring lugubriously at the baby, and everyone, even Angela laughed. Suddenly bright, she said: “Oh, Bill — you shouldn’t have. Look—shampoo!”

The tide had turned against him. The water in the English Channel was drifting westwards now, back to the Atlantic. For the most part, it was moving sluggishly at a knot or so; but where Start Point stuck out into the stream like a crooked forefinger, the tide raced past the land, as fast as a river in flood. Even with the engine on, Calliope was making hardly any headway over the ground. The lighthouse, standing on its own island of black shadowed rock, remained firmly stuck a mile off on the port bow, though the sea swept by in a wash of foam, and the boat’s wake trailed behind her in a broad V of curling water. It was bloody strange — as if reality had torn in half, and the two sides of the picture refused to match. When he looked at the sea, he was creaming along at top speed. But when he looked across at the land, he was as fixed as a navigation buoy, tethered to the seafloor on a chain and bucking fretfully on the tide. Sometimes the sea won, sometimes the land, and every time George looked, he knew that what his eyes told him was untrue.

He couldn’t rid his mouth of the carbony, acidic taste of the champagne.

Peter Moffatt said, “Well, here’s to Angie and Sheila — and George, of course”, and the baby in Angela’s arms began to cry, like a single, thin, monotonous note on the top of the scale on a harmonica. The sound deepened and grew louder, the wizened face filled out and turned into George’s own baby, up on the bridge aboard Hecla.

“She wants her milk … doesn’t she?” George said.

In full view of the bachelors, Angela exposed her nipple with its mysterious circlet of fair hair. The baby sucked, as sure of itself as a sea anemone fastening on an extended fingertip. The bachelors, silent in the presence of a sacrament, studied the turning fan over the bed. George watched. His eyes pricked with love and pride and hope. It was the only time that Angela ever let him see her suckling their baby; and Sheila was weaned at fourteen days.

It took an hour to round the lighthouse, with the wind dying away and the cliffs casting a widening pool of cold shadow over the sea. Calliope, straining against the surge of tide, inched past, her sails slatting uselessly, her engine drumming under George’s feet. Hunting for slack water close inshore, he steered the boat frighteningly near to the rocks. There was no slack water. The sea raced past the drying ledges, looking as smooth and thick as black treacle.

Beyond the lighthouse, the horizon was oddly lumpy and there were breakers ahead. Scared of running aground on a shoal, George checked with the chart and saw immediately what the trouble was. The tide, sweeping south and east, rode slap bang over a shallow hill of sand, where it crumpled and broke up. He tried to skirt the tangled water of the race, but was caught in the edge of it. Calliope was shoved and jostled by houndstooth waves that sprang up out of nowhere. Zigzags of foamy water, like the tracks of giant fish, charged at the boat. The steering went slack as she skidded on the lip of a yawning eddy. Down below, something heavy was sliding across the floor of the saloon. A wave like a waterspout threw Calliope on her side for a second, and George feared for the rigging as the boom of the slack mainsail crashed into the shrouds.

“And hands that do dishes …” Wedged in tight, he hung on to the wheel and saw the sky slide up from under his feet. The propeller screeched as a rogue wave lifted it clear of the water and made it grind on air. The wheelhouse windows streamed.

“Will be soft as your face …” Yawing and slamming her way through the last of the rough stuff, the boat carried him into the frozen calm of Start Bay, where he found that he was still bellowing that damned jingle out loud and the blood was foaming in his veins like the sea.

He went out on deck to get the sails down. Between the boat and the shore, the twilit water had the metallic iridescence of a pool of mercury. It was joined to Devonshire by a fine seam of wet sand. At the edge of the sea, the land was a long low strip of grassy dunes and straggling villages: from half a mile off it was as remote as a little world inside a blown glass paperweight. At Hall Sands there were anglers under green umbrellas; at Tor Cross, a matchstick man was throwing driftwood for his capering dog. One after another, lights came on in bungalows and squat mock Tudor villas: George, bundling the cold canvas in his arms, watched. It was the time for tea and sponge cakes and the electric-coloured yatter of children’s TV. The tips of his fingers were white and numb as he lashed the sail to the boom. He liked the feeling of being out at sea in the dark, unnoticed, looking in. When he went back to the wheelhouse he was smiling in his beard, as if the villages were a pretty invention that he’d just made up.

There was no making out the daymark above the entrance to the River Dart. He motored cautiously north through the still water towards a mountainous wall of matt black. A Naval College launch full of cadets cut across his bows. Then he was overtaken by a returning crabber, her stern deck blindingly floodlit, seagulls jostling in her wake like bats. George could hear the sea sucking on rocks worryingly close at hand.

Shielding his eyes from the lights of the trawler, he searched the darkness over on the port side and found the lazy red flash of Kingswear Main Light inside the estuary. He kept on course and waited for the red flash to turn to white. Red. Red. Red. Red. Red. Calliope seemed to be right under the cliff ahead before the white sector showed and he swung the boat to home in on the beam. The wooded land closed round him like fur. He squeezed between the turretted silhouettes of a pair of storybook castles, and there was Dartmouth — a carnival of lights on the water, a good party to gatecrash.

Even so, he was choosy about the company he kept. He left the regimented alloy forest of a yacht marina well to starboard, not wanting the magic of the evening to be spoiled by a lot of bloody yachtsmen. He dodged a ferry, slipped under the stern of an antique brigantine moored in the fairway, and came up in an uncrowded reach of inky water on the Kingswear side of the river. Working by torchlight, he dropped his hook and saw the heavy anchor wink deep down like a turning fish as the chain rattled over the bow.

He lit the paraffin lamps and tidied up the wreckage in the saloon. It wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d feared: two plates were broken; Conrad, Kipling, P. G. Wodehouse and Reed’s Nautical Almanac were tangled up together on the floor; the transistor radio had come unstowed and its casing was cracked, but when George switched it on a woman was reading the usual news. He got the charcoal stove going, poured himself half a tumblerful of Chivas Regal and laid out food in tins. Vera watched him from her photograph on the bulkhead.

She said: “Oh, George — you eating chickenshit again?” Chickenshit was one of Teddy’s words, and George resented it.

“It’s a perfectly good steak and kidney pudding,” he said.

“Steak and kidney chickenshit. You know the cholesterol level of that thing? One of these days, George, I am telling you, you are going to be dead before your time.”

He punctured the tin with a can opener and looked back at Vera on her rock, ample as a dugong.

“The trouble with you, George, is you just love to eat shit.” “Oh, do come off it, old love,” he said feebly, and lowered the tin carefully into a saucepan of hot water. He wasn’t up to much as a cook, but there were a few things that he could do pretty efficiently and Fray Bentos steak and kidney pudding was one of them.

With the trembling flames of the lamps, the glow of the charcoal stove and the twin gas rings burning blue in the galley, the boat was a cave of jumping shadows. He found Diana there, half hidden behind the hanging fern in its basket. She looked younger than when he’d last seen her, even more like the remembered girl on the black and white television screen, the outline of her face softened by the drifting smoke of her cigarette. He blessed her for being there — for being that kindly, floating trick of the air and the light. He brought up a half bottle of Pomerol from his cellar in the bilges, set out knife and fork and placemat on the saloon table, and dined with Diana.

It was the dining alone — more, even, than the cold palpable silence of Sheila’s room with its closed shutters — that George dreaded most. From May to September, Angela escaped to London for the hot season. Ahaza, the wall-eyed Jewish nurse from Ta’izz, was paid off for the duration and George was left to rattle in the empty house, a summer widower.

They’d moved to Crater Town, to an ancient, narrow, five-storey tower of baked mud, once the mansion of a date merchant. There were no European neighbours. Camping out by himself in the gloom and dust, George listened through a broken lattice to the babble of motor horns and shouted Arabic in the street below.

The other summer widowers were a miserable crew. They ate at the Club (toad in the hole, plum duff and warm, bottled Worthington), swapped dog-eared photos of their family houses in England, read their wives’ letters aloud to anyone who’d listen, formed drab huddles round the dartboard, and were treated like lepers by the bachelors. George went to the Club two or three evenings a week and found it lonelier than his forlorn lodgings in Crater Town.

So he stayed at home, with a Tilley lamp hung from a nail in a beam (the house wasn’t rigged for electricity). He set himself the job of working his way through the Tauchnitz Library, bought by the boxful, sight unseen, from Mesloumian’s, the Armenian bookshop on the corner. He wrote letters. At least, he didn’t so much write them as draw them. Finding things to say to Angela was always tricky: the weather was no use as a topic since it stayed the same way for weeks on end, with the temperature in the hundreds and the humidity in the nineties, and gossip from the Club was pretty sparse at that time of year. Jerry Kingdom shot himself in July; but that was like a freak earthquake, and anyway Jerry eventually pulled through, having missed his heart by several inches and causing only a nasty wound in his shoulder.

It was the drawings for Sheila that made the bind of letter-writing worthwhile. George drew Arab ladies, like human bell tents, with drums of water on their heads; sailors in wide trousers; dogs; ships at sea; Mr Al Sabir’s new American motor car. He always drew himself in the right hand margin of these pictures — a grinning beanpole in a hat, smoke billowing from his pipe, pointing at the subject of the drawing with a forefinger as big as a banana.

In the summer, George was sick with the knowledge that it was always like this, really. Sheila and Angela were connected to him by a fraying thread. Each winter, their presence in Aden was more of an accident, and the house on Bab al Qulu felt like an empty house, graced by unreliable and exotic visitors. As Angela’s letter in September ’49 put it, “I shall be coming to stay on the 14th …”; George tortured himself with that phrase.

He knew it was his fault. It wasn’t surprising that Angela was bored by him — he was bored by himself. Other chaps were bright as buttons, with their easy way of dishing out compliments, their knack of turning everything that happened to them into a clever joke. George felt lumpish and tongue-tied beside these men who sped prettily through the world like skaters on a rink. When the dried-up stream of dinner invitations began to flow again in October, he would see Angela at the far end of tables, laughing as she never laughed in the house, her enormous eyes alight with a rapt attention that George could never rouse.

“Yes,” George said to his neighbour at the table, a visiting agricultural boffin from the UN, “we should see a gross tonnage of at least two million by next year.” How could you be clever and funny about things like that?

He did what he could. Each year he dreamed up an adventure for his wife — something that would make her want to come back to Aden, with Sheila. It was George’s idea that she crossed the Empty Quarter with Freddie Blount, driving the second landrover. Everyone said that Freddie Blount was interested only in little brown boys, so George felt safe and Angela, on her return, kept the entire Protectorate spellbound for months with her marvellous stories of the trip. George found a berth for Angela when he heard that Toby Morgan was planning to sail a dhow from Aden to Kuwait. She camped in the mountains in Oman with Alan Pigott-Williams, and flew to Baghdad, from where she drifted down the Tigris to Basra on a raft with Freya Stark.

When Angela was away on her expeditions, George came back early from the bunkering station to the house and played with Sheila. Ahaza sat cross-legged in the corner of the room, her wall-eye roaming. Some mornings, he carried Sheila on his shoulders to his office on the quayside and saw her properly piped aboard the visiting ships.

“And an orange juice, if you have one, for Rear Admiral Grey.”

The captains made a gratifying fuss over her, and Sheila loved the ships — their spooky mazes of ladders and hatchways and secret compartments. Toddling stiffly on wide-apart legs, she made her tour of inspection, collecting treasures at each stop: a rough-cut opal on the bridge, biscuits in the galley, a useful box from the ABs’ quarters.

“Bound for Cape Town?” George said, writing out a docket in the wardroom with Sheila seated on his knee, making crumbs. “Don’t suppose you could find space for the Admiral and her rusty lieutenant, could you?”

It was what he always said to every captain. With Angela away, George cherished a sweet recurrent fantasy in which he and Sheila were afloat, alone and out of reach, on an ocean of blue-shot silk. At bedtime in the house on Bab al Qulu, Sheila demanded, “Pigrin Boat! Pigrin Boat! Pigrin Boat!”

“The owl and the pussycat went to sea, in a beautiful—”

“Pigrin Boat!” shouted Sheila.

“They took some honey, and plenty of money, wrapped up in a …”

“Fi Pow Note!”

With Sheila and Ahaza in the house, George was on a gentle pleasure cruise. When Angela was around, it was a bit like getting a radio report that there was a U-boat somewhere in your sector. The sea looked just the same, but you stood your watch numbly waiting for the sudden white porpoise track of the torpedo.

She scored some near misses. One afternoon George came back to the house to find her looking appallingly ill, her left cheek swollen out as big and round as a tennis ball, her eyes glazed, her pupils distended. She seemed to be staring straight through him, with her mouth wobbling rhythmically from side to side.

“Darling! — Ahaza!”

When she opened her mouth, he saw that her teeth were flecked with bright green. Then he noticed the pile of privetlike sprigs on the floor beside her. She was chewing qat like an Arab.

The bubble of anxiety broke. She looked absurd. Pathetic. He said: “Honestly, Angela, for Christ’s sake — you want Ahaza to see you like that? Where’s Sheila?”

Angela looked through him, showing her Martian teeth. She said, “Fuck you,” in a voice so flatly factual and so serious, that George felt the words rankle inside him, doing permanent damage to something vital. He’d always known that he was too dim for Angela, but he’d never realized that he was her enemy before.

She said, “You’ve ruined my life,” and spat the qat out on the floor — a gobbet of green stuff, like the turd of a sick animal.

That evening, at the Kerrs’, with Peter Moffatt and Toby Morgan, Angela starred. Describing her qat-chewing, she said, “I think I’m going to become an absolute slave to it — it opens so many doors, you know.” Pipe in mouth, George smiled twistedly and nodded, leading the applause; but he was wondering which particular door it was that she was talking about, and when it would finally slam shut on him.

She bought a Leica and announced that she was going to publish a book of photographs called The Harem. She took off for the hills and came back with a mountain of snapshots, most of them wrongly exposed. George gave her a light meter, and Angela played with it a few times, then said that f-stops and shutter speeds were really much better if you left them to instinct and feel. She did her own developing down in the cellar and her hands nowadays were stained with hypo. Without telling her, George picked a dozen of her best pictures and mailed them to a publisher in London; he saw Angela’s photography as his last lifeline to Sheila. The publisher replied, writing direct to Angela. The subject was interesting, he said, but neither the quality of the prints nor the composition of her work allowed him to hold out much hope for The Harem. He suggested, however, that with fewer photographs and a really original text, she might approach the Cresset Press.

Angela accused George of treachery and betrayal. He had gone behind her back, spying on her. He had deliberately chosen all her worst pictures. He was trying to sabotage her career because he was jealous of her talent.

“All I wanted—” George said.

“You’re trying to destroy me, that’s what you want,” Angela said. “But you won’t destroy me, Georgie, and you won’t destroy my baby, because I won’t let you do that. See?”

He didn’t see. He didn’t see anything at all, he was so blinded by the shocking injustice of what Angela was saying.

That February, Freya Stark was staying at Sana’a, three hundred miles of rutted tracks away, up on the plateau. Angela was determined to visit her, and to take pictures of the city.

“It’s supposed to be like something straight out of the middle ages!” she said at the bungalow which Justin Quayle shared with Tony Flowers.

Alan Pigott-Williams lent her a landrover, which she loaded with aluminium boxes of photographic equipment, water in jerry cans and a suitcase of London summer dresses. Late in the morning, George looked up at the hills from his office in the bunkering station and saw a puff of red dust climbing the ribbed face of the range. He assumed that the dust was his wife.

For a week George was happy, with Sheila his constant companion. They read books together.

“Look-Jan-et-look! See-the-dog! Look-John-look! See-the-ball!”

They spent a morning on HMS Alert. They played draughts. On Friday, they went swimming at Fisherman’s Bay: hand in hand with his daughter in the tingling surf, George was in a panic of love.

On Saturday, he woke in the dark to a noise from downstairs. He listened and heard it again — the surreptitious scrape of footsteps on stone. There had been a lot of talk lately of qarsana, of thieves from Eritrea who landed by night from the sea. Bungalows on Steamer Point had been broken into and an Adeni watchman stabbed to death. George felt for the torch on the bedside table and for his old naval revolver which he had taken to keeping under the pillows of the bed that he no longer shared with Angela.

He tiptoed down the narrow flight of tall steps, barefoot, holding his breath in the clammy darkness. He heard the whispered word bugah. It meant tyrant, oppressor. So it was political, this vile, stealthy shuffling in the hallway. He was suddenly very frightened. He clicked the torch on and shone it at the noise.

Angela was there, with Bill Nesbit. They both looked filthy, as if they’d been wallowing in a dusthole, and George could smell their intimate sweatiness. They were bent together over a Tilley lamp, trying to get it going.

He said: “I thought you were supposed to be in Sana’a.”

“We were,” Angela said in her brightest party voice. “Such fun!”

The flame of the lamp shot up. Nesbit said “Bugger,” and turned it down.

“Oh, do look!” Angela said. “Georgie’s got his little gun.”

George realized that he was pointing it straight at Nesbit, and for a moment it looked as if Nesbit was going to stretch his hands above his head. George said: “I thought—”

“Do you think he’s going to use it? Oh, Georgie, go on, do! It’d brighten things up no end round here. I’m quite prepared to die for something on the lines of Crazed Bunkerman Slays Wife &: Lover — aren’t you?” She put her hands on Nesbit’s bare forearm. The skin of his face was pale under the dust, and he was putting on a bloody awful show of pretending to laugh, going haw! haw! haw! haw! far too loudly, and exposing his gums like a frightened chimpanzee.

George badly wanted to be rid of the revolver, but there was nowhere to put it — no pockets in his striped pyjamas, no table within reach.

Nesbit said, “I was just seeing Angie … safely … home, you know,” and hawed again.

“Oh, do put that silly thing away, George, you look too ludicrous for words.”

Nesbit looked to Angela for a cue, failed to get one, and said: “I suppose I ought really to be making tracks, sir.”

It was the “sir” that hurt most: George was only two years older than Nesbit — if that. He gave a miserable half-shrug and pointed at the door with the barrel of the gun.

“Well. Sorry. Awkward silence, haw, haw! Goodnight.” Nesbit backed out, the grin on his dirty face looking like a bad flesh wound.

There was the whirr and clank of Nesbit’s starter motor in the street outside, then a rumble as the engine fired.

“Good Christ,” George said.

“Man Stands Girl Up: Husband Blamed,” Angela said.

How could she be so fearless?

Exhausted, beyond tears, beyond surprise now, George said: “Why bring him back here, to this house?”

Angela stared at him, her face as void of liking or interest as a brick. She licked a smudge of dust from her upper lip. She said: “I do so hate fucking in the backs of cars, particularly in landrovers, don’t you?”

It was, as he explained to Diana in the flickering saloon, Angela’s last, and ultimately successful, attempt to rig a final scene with enough drama in it to finish the play. George hit her. For the first time, he began to shout at his wife. He howled at her — the words coming out half-formed and grammarless. It was a minute or two before he heard his own voice joined by the appalled screams of Sheila in her room at the top of the house.

A little after nine o’clock, the tide turned again. The lights of the town began to slide slowly past the portholes, then reappeared on the starboard side as the boat swung on her anchor to face the sea. Dartmouth went into a spin; George placidly washed up his dinner things. He was thinking of Fisherman’s Bay, of Sheila wriggling in his arms in the sea, her ribcage as raw-boned as a whippet’s. The Indian Ocean rolled in, veined and green. The curling tops of the breakers caught the sun as they exploded into flashpowder.

“Here’s Arthur!” George shouted over the magnificent gravelly roaring of the surf, and Sheila squealed with joy as he lifted her up over his head, the water peeling off her in shivers of white light.

He pumped the bilges out, checked the riding lamp in the mizzen shrouds, and slept in the forecabin, a sleep void of dreams. Twice in the night he came close to the surface like a lazily rising fish, heard the companionable mutter of the river close by his ear, and sank again.

He was awake early. There was no wind. The water looked like tarnished foil under a washcloth sky. After breakfast, he busied himself with pleasant, shipshusbandly jobs. He polished the brasswork in the wheelhouse; he lowered a galvanized bucket on the end of a rope into the river and sluiced down the decks. Breathing heavily, he leaned on the main boom and blew up the inflatable dinghy with the foot pump. The rubbery fabric swelled round him into an undignified craft like a grey chipolata sausage, which George launched over the rail with a splash.

He needed money. His bank now was up forward in the chain locker, in a Huntley & Palmer’s biscuit tin. What was left of the cash that he’d brought back from Geneva was stored there, in wads as stiff as decks of cards. He hadn’t bothered to clean the tin out first, and it still held a few remains of a fruit cake which his mother must have baked ten years ago, at least. The money smelled of almonds. George pared away a fifty pound note from the front of a pack with his thumb, and hid the tin under a coiled heap of rusty chain.

He made a slow, crabwise passage across the river in the dinghy, fighting the drift of the current and the ebb tide. Every time he looked over his shoulder, Dartmouth seemed to have receded a little further. Struggling to keep his place on the stream, he paddled as hard as he could through the fish crates, logs, old light bulbs, plastic bottles and soft drink cans. A torn car seat sailed past; a vacant pair of oilskin trousers was going cruising in company with a distended pink polythene bag. As soon as George let his oars rest for a moment, the dinghy became part of this glacial seaward trail of garbage. Seeing his own ragged plimsolls, their eyelets gone, their lace-ends turned to feathery catkins, he wished that he’d taken time off to trim his beard: when last observed it had put him squarely in the flotsam class.

He reached the quayside, tied the dinghy to a ladder, and scrambled up and over the wall into the street. The pavement felt like a trampoline. His first attempt at walking made him landsick, so he held on to a lamp-post, where he was given a wide berth by the morning shoppers. When he got going again, he planted his feet wide and leaned to outwit the land as it rose on the beam.

Crossing the road he was half-deafened by the long contemptuous blast of a motorist’s horn. He skipped painfully clear of a scowling radiator grille. Ahead of him, a cyclist swerved, then turned to shout at George as soon as he had ridden past. People on the pavement stopped and stared as he leaped and stumbled through to the far shore. He turned back on his persecutors and remembered that cars in England always did drive on the left-hand side.

He tried to lose himself in the crowd but his wet plimsolls, flapping in the dust, left a spoor of footprints like the track of an unsteady seal. Still rolling slightly, he collided with a boy with orange hair that stuck up from his scalp in foot high spikes. “I am most frightfully sorry,” George said; and the boy smiled back as if he and George were members of the same threatened tribe.

He found a temporary anchorage in a corner shop selling newspapers and groceries. He took his place in the queue of women at the counter and practised the deep breathing exercise that Vera claimed was good for his heart. You had to close your eyes and imagine that you were a deep well. In a mountain, Vera said.

“No sun today. There’s a strike on.”

“Give us a mirror and a star, then.”

George opened his eyes again. The headlines of the day’s papers were arranged on the counter like a crossword. He read IAN TELLS ARTHUR: GET STUFFED and NO DIVORCE FOR DEIRDRE AND KEN. He closed his eyes and let the voices in the shop wash over him.

“Awlid haretna, al-liss wal kilab.”

“Ne bith him to hearpan hyge.”

“Ik kan alleen nog regels schrijva.”

“Ta ta, dear.”

“Ne to hringthege, ne to wife wyn.”

“Niebo i pieklo!”

“Ne to worulde hyht. Ta ta, josy.”

“Ta ta. Yuspliz?”

“Oh … sorry,” George said. “I wonder,” he spoke with care, mouthing his words, “if you have such a thing as a pint of milk?”

He bought milk, eggs and a tin of steak and kidney pudding. He paid with the fifty-pound note, which the woman accepted with a sigh and a glare. “I’m afraid I’ve nothing smaller.” The woman stood at the till, sniffing with annoyance and making a stolid pantomime of the business of counting out his change. Speaking to someone behind him, she tipped her head in George’s direction. “The season’s starting early this year, it looks like. There you are, Monsewer!” she shouted at George; “Forty-eight pounds and sixty-two pee! And Bon-Jewer to you!”

“I’m not deaf, you know,” George said, stuffing the soggy tangle of notes into his trouser pocket. As he let himself out of the shop he heard the word “Tourists!”—a term of abuse ripe enough to comprehend a man like him in his entirety.

When he climbed down the ladder to the dinghy, holding his bag of things between his teeth, he found Sheila waiting for him. Lost inside the padded bulk of her gorse yellow Junior Crewsaver, she looked famished and skinny, an Oxfam child. Her face was as brown as an Arab’s.

Sheila sat up on the stern of the boat, trailing her fingers in the water as George rowed away from the wall. He fussed over her. “Do sit more in, darling. Yes, like that. And keep a hold on the rope there. We don’t want you going overboard.”

“I can swim,” Sheila said. “I can swim eighteen strokes.”

“Yes, darling, but the water’s very cold here at this time of year. It’s not warm enough for swimming.”

“I can swim further than Tory Wilshawe.”

They drifted out on to the waxy surface of the open river.

The tide was on the turn now, and the going was easy. George stopped the dinghy so that Sheila could exchange pleasantries with a pair of swans. He paddled her close under the side of the sail training ship, and they watched the children there, swarming high up in the yards, while a man with a megaphone jollied them along from down on deck. Sheila squinched up her eyes and made a face. “They’ll fall,” she said.

“They’ve all got harnesses on. They’re safer than they look.”

Squiring her on the water, the proprietor of all she saw, George gave Sheila the whole of Dartmouth as an enormous present: the Naval College on the hill, the car ferry trundling across the river on its chains, the big crabber manoeuvring in midstream, the yachts and rainbow sailboards, the old cream and chocolate steam train whoop-whooping out of the woods on the Kingswear shore.

Sheila said: “I saw a boy fall off that ship. He was drowned.”

“No he wasn’t. He just went on swimming under the water and turned into a sealion.”

“You’re so silly, Daddy. You’re too silly for words!”

“Don’t sit up on the edge like that, darling — you’ll fall in.”

“I’ll turn into a sealion.”

“Oh, no, you won’t—”

“Oh, yes, I will!”

Sheila kept him company until he was alongside Calliope. He climbed aboard lightly, swinging himself over the rail with a young man’s easy stride, and hauled the dinghy in after him. Down below, waiting for his breakfast coffee to reheat on the stove, George found himself explaining that there wasn’t really enough wind to sail by, but that the barometer looked steady and, once in Lyme Bay, the tides would be slack and they should make Lyme itself before it got dark.

“What do you think?”

“You’re the big enchilada, baby.” Teddy said, loosely sprawled on the starboard settee berth sucking Sun Top through a straw. He raised himself on one elbow and looked incuriously at Dartmouth through a porthole. “What is this joint, anyway?”

“You’d hate it,” George said.

“Looks like too much of a marshmallow town for me.”

“That’s the trouble. They’re all marshmallow towns round here.”

“Well, if you’ve got the ants, let’s burn rubber.” He sank back on the cushions and noisily sucked at the last of his drink.

By eleven o’clock George had winched the anchor up and was under way, with Calliope ploughing at half speed ahead through a misty drizzle so fine that one couldn’t tell it was raining except for the softened edges of the castles and the woodlands at the mouth of the estuary. The velvety water ahead gradually faded in colour until it was all of a piece with the mother-of-pearl sky.

He set a southwesterly course on the autopilot to skirt Castle Ledge and the jagged, gullshitty island of Mew Stone, and whistled a few bars of “Tiger Rag”, thinking it might help to raise a breeze. But the tell-tale ribbons on the shrouds didn’t stir, and the only movement of the sea was a flaccid bulge of swell left over from yesterday.

It took half an hour to lose the land astern. As soon as it was safely out of sight, George eased the boat round northwards on a course of 041°. Five miles off Berry Head, according to his dead reckoning, the drizzle petered out and the ribbons on the shrouds began to ripple in an idle, offhand sort of way. In the cockpit, he sucked on his forefinger and raised it high to test the air. There wasn’t a wind, exactly; more an atmospheric restlessness, a faint snuffling from somewhere away to the south-east. When he hoisted the sails, they hung in creases from the masts. He stopped the engine and whistled “The Miller of Dee”.

Calliope seemed not to be moving at all, but the rudder was leaving a trickling eddy of water behind it; and when George flipped a matchbox over the bow and paced it down the deck as it bobbed along the boat’s side, he counted eleven seconds before it passed the stern. About one knot, he reckoned, thinking of the Queen Adelaide and the passage to Aden.

The Dunnetts had left a mackerel line in the tool locker, a lurid contraption of lead weights and bright feathers which George lowered over the side: at least he could frighten the fish if he couldn’t catch them. He sat in the cockpit, tweaking the line with his fingers and getting no bites.

“Come on, fish—” He could feel the deep thrum of the weights in the water like an electrical current. “Send me a signal and state your position.”

“Why are you talking to the fish, Daddy?”

“Because there’s nothing fish like more than a little polite conversation. The little fishes of the sea, They sent an answer back to me. The little fishes’ answer was, We cannot do it, Sir, because-”

“They didn’t.”

“Yes they did, honour bright. And there was a man once who used to charm the fish by playing his flute to them on a pond.”

He let Sheila hold the line. She gripped it tightly, showing the whites of her knuckles as if she expected imminent contact with a shark. She said “Hello, fish!” in an experimental voice and giggled.

“That’s the way. You know, the biggest treat for a fish, what he likes best in all the world, is to hear the seven times table spoken very clearly with no urns and ers.”

The boat flopped about in the swell. Water gurgled in the tanks; the booms of the sails creaked and slammed. A man could live for a long time like this, out of the way of things, offshore, beyond the reach of the snags and troubles of the land. You wouldn’t need much — enough wind to keep you out of the doldrums, a sextant, a supply of fish hooks, a good clock …

“Seven fours are twenty-eight, seven fives are thirty-five,” Sheila sang out in her pipsqueak voice.

George’s crooked smile disclosed a single tooth, stained yellow with tobacco. He was Noah, seeing the last mountain-top go under, with the ark riding clear on the flood. There was a lot to be said for the idea of carrying the world away in a gopherwood shell. George leaned back in the cockpit and pulled the long brim of his cap over his eyes. (It had shed two more letters.)

“Seven sevens are forty-nine, seven eights are fifty-six—”

He scratched at an itch in his beard, thinking of his crew, his family. Diana was there, and Sheila, of course. Teddy and Vera were guests; and for the first time George found himself not minding that there were jokes between those two that he missed. At dinner in the saloon, they crowded round the little table, all talking at once, as families did. He looked from lamplit face to lamplit face. He topped up Teddy’s glass and caught Diana’s private smile. They were safe with him, all of them. He plotted their course, kept the sails trimmed and the log up to date. He was their pilot, shepherd, paterfamilias. Though quite how the sleeping arrangements worked out, George wasn’t sure.

“Seven elevens are seventy — I’ve got one! I’ve got one! Look, Daddy, I’ve got one!”

And she had. The fish showed in the water as a scoop of silver and came tumbling over the gunwale — a lightning bolt on the end of a piece of string. It thrashed on the duckboards, shedding lilac scales like coins. George killed it quickly with a winch handle. In seconds, the expression of astonished accusation in its eye began to fade. He watched as its scales dulled and its skin wrinkled. It was a sorry sort of fish, out of condition, its head far too big for its body.

Cleaning it in a bucket of seawater was an act of penance. He cut off its head and pulled out its intestines with his fingers. Sheila said “Yuck” and squeezed her eyes tight shut when he chucked the bloody water over the side.

There was nothing in sight — no boats, no land. George went below and grilled the mackerel for his lunch. He couldn’t finish it: its too-white flesh tasted vaguely of soap flakes. Later, he hid the fishing line in the back of the tool locker. He didn’t want to kill any more things. That wasn’t what an ark was for.

At Lyme Regis Calliope lay against the breakwater just inside the harbour entrance, where she dried out at low tide. Beached, out of her element, she looked enormous, more ship than boat. George stood underneath her, gumbooted, scrubbing the slime and barnacles off her great ribbed belly with a broom. Fiddler crabs scuttled between his feet. Lulled by the rhythmical scratch of the brush on the wood, he found himself laughing aloud because all he could think of was Lady Standing’s Rejuvenating Cream For Tired Faces And Hands.

The mizzen sheet was looking badly frayed around the running blocks where it was fastened to the boom. George walked into the town to replace it, taking the beach route where shallow ledges of grey rock shelved down into the sea. He jumped from ledge to ledge, breathing Vera’s way, and arrived at a crevasse too wide to jump, where a tongue of sea ran in, making a deep anemone pool. The surface of the rock on which he stood was lightly scrolled with a spiral pattern as big as a dinner plate.

His father tapped it with the handle of his prawn net.

“Ammonite,” George said.

“Period?”

“Jurassic.”

“After the Jura mountains. In France, old boy,” his father said. George watched his mother, walking on ahead. Though there was no wind, she was pushing at her skirt to stop it blowing up above her knees.

In Lyme he found a yacht chandler’s called Midships. He stood browsing among the cardboard drums of rope, looking for one of the right thickness to fit the block on the boom.

“Yes. Can I help you?” He was a fat man in a guernsey with Midships embroidered in red across the chest. George spotted him immediately.

“Marsland!”

“Yes—”

Poor Marsland. He’d lost all his hair since his Pwllheli days and his gums had shrunk away from his teeth. On the profit side, he had gained a vast drinker’s gut and a pair of gold-rimmed half-moon specs. Taken all round, Marsland showed a pretty disastrous net loss.

“Grey,” George said. “Remember? Pwllheli. We were on the same course.”

“Good heavens. Were we?” He peered at George, first over the tops of his lenses and then through the bottoms. He didn’t seem very pleased with what he saw.

“I didn’t have the beard then,” George said, doing his best to help.

“A lot of chaps on the course …” Marsland seemed to be taking a particular interest in George’s hair, as if he suspected George of concealing his own baldness under a wig. “No, you don’t stand out at all in my mind, I’m afraid.”

Offended, George said, “I knew who you were as soon as I saw you.”

“Yes,” Marsland said suspiciously. “Pwllheli.” He was, George noticed, trying to hold his stomach in. He pointed to his chest. “You see I’ve still kept the old handle.”

“Sorry?”

“Midships. You know. If you were on the course. You all used to call me ‘Midships’ … and it sort of … stuck. Midships Marsland. I think it all actually started with my steering the longboat … couldn’t keep it straight … some silly thing …”

This was most peculiar. They’d never called Marsland Midships. Midships was a man named Peters, who had indeed been famous for his zig-zag courses. Why on earth should Marsland want to hijack someone else’s nickname? The cadet whom George knew was a colourless public schoolboy who seemed totally careless of his impact on other people. Not that the impact had been much: he was someone whom no-one would remember unless they actually saw him. Yet all that time Marsland must have been aching for the kind of popularity that went with a nickname, to the point where he’d finally been driven to stealing another man’s.

“Ah, yes,” George said. “Of course. Midships.”

“I don’t think we called you anything, did we?” Marsland said, with bulging complacency.

“No. Grey by name and grey by nature, I’m afraid.”

“Didn’t think so.”

George bought ten metres of rope for his new mizzen sheet. Marsland cut it with an electric gadget that melted the strands into a hard plastic knob at the end. George said: “Remember old Prynne?”

“Prynne? No, I don’t think so. Was he one of us?”

Paying at the till, George answered Marsland’s question about what he was doing in Lyme Regis.

Marsland said: “Sounds too bloody lonely by half.”

“No — I don’t find it lonely at all.”

“What, you mean, with all the piss-ups ashore and so forth?”

George didn’t try to put the man right. As he left the shop, ducking between racks of jerseys, captains’ hats and yellow stormgear, he heard Marsland call, “Good old Pwllheli!”

He waited for the sea, watching it inch over the sand beyond the harbour mouth. His timing was going to be too fine for comfort. According to the almanac, the tide would begin to sweep east round Portland Bill at 1600, but High Water at Lyme was not until 1708. If Calliope floated at half-tide, say 1400 hours, he wouldn’t make Portland much before 1800 or even later. The longer he waited, the darker and fiercer would be his passage round the Bill. He leaned over the stern rail: a trickle of dun-coloured water was nudging a sodden cigarette pack along the dry bottom.

At 1400 Calliope was still leaning against the wall, her squashed fenders as hard as lumps of concrete. At 1415 George, sitting in the saloon, felt the boat shift a few inches and heard the fenders sigh. It wasn’t until 1440 that she floated free and he was able to rid her of the cat’s cradle of ropes that tied her to Lyme Regis. Going astern, he held his breath, expecting the keel to grind on sand at any moment, but she slid past the pier head without touching and he brought her round and pointed her at Portland Bill, on a course of 134°.

Sails were useless in the strengthening headwind from the southeast. The boat lumbered on under engine, bucking the sullen, spitting little waves. It was cold and sunless. George watched the wind anxiously. The shipping forecast had said it would be Force 3 to 4. This felt like 4, a rather solid and intimidating 4, at that. No problem here, but round the Bill it would blow straight into the tide and raise a tricky sea. He was tempted to put back into Lyme but was deterred by the prospect of sharing the same town as Marsland. At 1700 the wind lost its heart and drifted round into the east. The tops of the waves stopped breaking and turned to milky green spun glass.

It was twilight before the boat was running in the lee of Chesil Beach. The unearthly level straightness of its piled shingle looked as bleak as a line in a ledger. Nothing seemed to grow on it. He could see no people. Even the sea, sucking along its edge, seemed repelled by it. It had the comfortlessness of a cold outpost of Sahara; though the Sahara, George thought, at least had some curves to its name. There were no curves on Chesil Beach. For more than a mile in front, and many miles behind, it stretched away, ruled and rigid, as unfriendly a coast as George had ever seen.

He had brought the bottle of Chivas Regal up into the wheelhouse to help him get round Portland Bill. He filled his pipe and set it beside the wheel.

He saw the beach quicken as the tide got Calliope in its grip. He steered in as close as he dared to the speeding shingle and watched the lighthouse ahead. Every twenty seconds four rapid powerful flashes lit the water and showed it as a rumpled black oilskin. In the long interval between the flashes, George was blind. The compass light shone like a pinprick on the floating card. Each time the lighthouse flashed, he checked the bearing of the boat against the shore and clung to the number. 180°. 184°. 177°. The ragged, shadowy edge of the Bill was slithering past, fifty yards off, and he could see the tide heaping up against its low cliffs in the strobelike pulses of the turning light, as high above him now as the moon. 174°. 171°. 165°. Calliope shot round the point, stumbling and sliding in the fast water. Her steering kept on going suddenly slack as if the chains had fallen out of connection with the rudder. Caught in an eddy, she lurched, lost her heading, and George found himself pointed straight at the shore. He hauled her round again, fighting the current.

“That’s it! Easy now—easy!” He was shouting. “We’re fine. Careful … nicely! Watch this one — yes! And round we go, come on — come on! There you are!”

The Race was there — over to seaward, an amazing tumble of white, caught for a half-second in the lighthouse beam. The sea was standing up on end, in blocklike pyramids, and it was growling at him. George could hear it over the noise of the engine, a continuous, bass, thunder of water against water. It seemed impossible that the sea could ever make a sound like that, it was so deep, so ripe with animal malevolence, the sort of sound that you expected to hear only in bad dreams.

Calliope skidded sideways and made for the breakers. He wrenched her back on course. Between the Race and the lighthouse there was — not the “smooth passage” of the pilot book, but a gap of black, corrugated, roiling water, the width of a city street. Spinning the spokes of the wheel, hearing the chains grumble, he threaded the boat into the gap, and held on tight as she see-sawed her way through in a caul of spray. The short steep waves felt rock-like; the frames of the boat jarred each time she struck. George was as afraid of running on to the beach as he was of being sucked into the Race: the sand was at his elbow, flying by. In the Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash of the beam, he saw a notice saying NO BATHING zip past the rail to port — and a stranded motor tyre — and a bucket — and someone’s shoe.

“Yes!” he said. “Yes! Yes! We’re almost there! Now, watch it, will you! Easy … easy. Beautiful. You see? It’s tailing off now. The land’s slowed down. We’re well past the bad bit. Don’t you think?”

Through the open wheelhouse door he could hear the growl of the Race coming from astern now, and the lighthouse was throwing the boat’s shadow ahead of her on the water. He drank from the bottle. Whisky splashed on his throat; he had whisky in his beard. He had some trouble in screwing the cap back on, his hands shook so much. But it was a happy fever. George said, “Did you ever see anything like that before? Christ, but that was bloody magnificent — wasn’t it?”

He still had the shakes when he turned into Weymouth and slipped under the banked lights of the Sealink ferries on their moorings. He was shaky when he stepped on to the quay with his ropes. He crouched under a streetlamp, doing and undoing a bowline knot that wouldn’t come out right. Finally he had to recite, “Over and under and over and round and over and under and through” a raw cadet again.

A sweetshop and tobacconist’s was open on the quay. George stood in a daze in front of the coloured chocolate bars. Full of the sea, he had lost the words you needed for the shore. He said, “ … writing paper — have you?”

“No, all we’ve got is the cards,” the man said, making no sense at all. He pointed at a carousel of views of Weymouth, tit-and-bum blondes, kittens, drunkards and naked children on lavatories.

On one card, a young man was dragging a girl upstairs. He was carrying a carton of ice cream. The captain said, Quick, dear, before it gets soft! George had a few moments’ difficulty in working out the joke. When he got it, he stood in front of the carousel, wagging his head slowly from side to side.

He said: “No paper at all?”

“Only wrapping paper.”

“I suppose these’ll have to do, then.” He shovelled the cards out of the stand in handfuls. Cards spilled round his feet. The shopman gathered them up and put them in a bag for him.

“You must have a big family,” the man said.

“No. Just one daughter.”

He carried his cards to the bistro along the quay. His stall was poorly lit by a candle on top of a frozen fountain of wax. George asked for a carafe of white wine, spread the first five cards in a row on the red-checkered tablecloth, and settled down to write.