Foreign Land

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The peace summit, the car workers’ strike and the two per cent rise in the mortgage rate were elbowed out of the radio news by the gale. In Wiltshire, a motorcyclist was squashed by a falling tree; he was taken to hospital but found to be dead on arrival. The Severn Bridge was closed to traffic. In Gloucester a whirlwind removed the roofs of three homes on a council estate. A Fleetwood trawler was missing, presumed lost, in the Irish Sea. Two warships collided in Plymouth Sound; the cost of the damage sustained was estimated to be in excess of £l.6m. Ferry services to the Continent were suspended, though a spokesman from the British Airports Authority stated that flights from Heathrow were operating normally. An elderly woman died in Northampton when her garden shed collapsed in winds of speeds said by the Meteorological Office to be more than 80mph. Power cables were down in many areas, and flooding was reported in places as far apart as Peeblesshire and Dartford, Kent. Late news just in announced that all train services in and out of Liverpool Street were severely disrupted and passengers should expect long delays.

27th March. 0925. Sea Area Thames. Wind SW, Severe Gale 9 to Storm 10. Rain squalls. Visibility poor. Bar. 967mb., falling more slowly.

To begin with, Sheila had taken the cards for some sort of awful schoolboy joke. The first to arrive had been Weymouth Pier, although it was numbered 4 in a scrawled circle on its top left-hand corner. It was followed in the next post by Go on, Dick — the further you’re in the nicer it feels! (11) and We can’t have that dangling — it’ll have to come off! (17). Number 1 (a view of Lulworth Cove) came the next morning, along with six more, including All Henry wants to do is stay home every night and play with my pussy! (13), a donkey in a straw hat (3) and Look at my husband making his little what-not stand! (24). This last was the only one that was signed. It ended: “Good night, Sheila. I love you. Daddy.”

The words made her want to scream.

By lunchtime on the second day of the deluge, she could no longer bear to pick up the mail herself. She heard the soft riffle of letters through the flap in the front door as a violation. She sent Tom to get them.

“How many?”

“ … three … four … five,” Tom said, handing her another sheaf of seaside smut.

She read:

9 healing process. So much is beginning to add up. Things that I thought were gone long ago have come back. I feel very close to you — even, in a curious way, close to your mother. It’s a bit late in the day now to claim that I’ve begun, at least, to understand what happened between all of us, but one does see

She turned the card over. It said: Brr! I’ll be glad to get something warm inside me!

“It’s revenge,” Sheila said. “He hates me.”

Tom said: “This one’s all about some bloke from Pwllheli.”

Sheila started to laugh. “Oh, God. The world’s going to be saved by a man from Pwllheli—” But she choked on her laughter and found tears in her eyes.

As the cards arrived, she tried arranging them in order, front side up, to see if there was some vindictive pattern in their pictures or their captions, but they made no sense at all, except that they seemed to get progressively dirtier.

It took four days and seven posts to fill in all the gaps in the series. On the fourth day came the news of the gales, and Sheila’s fury with her father dissolved into helpless anxiety. She kept the radio on in her study. At each hourly news bulletin, she expected to hear something terrible. She kept on going to the lavatory next door and being sick. After the eleven o’clock news she found Tom holding her head as she spat a trickle of yellow vomit into the bowl. Grateful for his hands as they gentled her, she cried — coughing, laughing, coughing again.

“I’m sorry, lovely. I think it’s just being pregnant that does it.”

He was wiping her mouth for her.

“There’s something horribly infectious about insanity,” Sheila said. “One seems to catch it like a ’flu bug.”

“He knows what he’s doing — on the sea, I mean. He was in the Navy.”

“He’s out of his mind. He wouldn’t be safe with a pedal boat in a park. A yacht capsized off Bridlington in the North Sea. A family of four was rescued by helicopter,” she said, parroting the news.

Tom leaned against the lintel, big as a black bear. “I could go and find him for you if you like,” he said.

“Could you? How?” she said, feeling muzzy-headed and stupid. Her mouth tasted of sick. She could hear the branches of the plane tree thrashing over the house and the wind harping tunelessly in the telephone wires.

“You’d only have to ask around a bit. It’d work in nicely. I’ve got to go down to Shaftesbury sometime, anyway.”

She couldn’t imagine Tom in Shaftesbury. “Whatever for?”

“You know. Things.”

For a moment she saw her father, slung over Tom’s huge shoulder in a fireman’s lift, Tom lugging him doggedly home like the things he brought back in sacks. She was smiling now.

Tom said: “I can get down there this afternoon. If I can get hold of Trev.”

27th March. 1355. Sea Area Plymouth. Wind SW, Gale 8, locally Severe Gale 9, veering westerly later. Showers, heavy in north. Visibility moderate, locally poor. Bar. 974 mb., now rising.

Diana had been out before breakfast in the morning, with a raincoat pulled over her night things, to collect the mail from her box at the top of the rutted and slippery drive. Two cards by the noon delivery completed her collection. She spread them out on the rug by the fire — seventeen in all, from “My dear Diana,” to “Lots of love, George”. One of today’s cards said:

6 I hope you won’t mind to find yourself counted among my rum crew of companions. At present, I’m afraid that I seem to be doing all the talking, and you’re just listening there, behind that potted fern thing, which I’ve refrained from watering as per your instructions—

No, she didn’t mind at all. The cards had fallen out of a cold sky — an amazing bonus. She was delighted by them. Even the stupid jokes on their fronts made her laugh; and when Diana found herself laughing at What I really want is a nice-sized tool with a rounded end!, she knew that some happy change had taken place in her own internal weather.

It was like seeing a dam burst up on a mountainside, and feeling something in yourself go out to that avalanche of plunging water. Your response was so immediate and instinctive that you just woke to it, and accepted it, and that was that.

George. There was nothing ambiguous in the cards; the double-entendres on one side only helped to underline the plainness of the statement on the other. They were a declaration, and an invitation. They demanded a response as least half as recklessly generous as the cards themselves.

It had been years since Diana had done anything much on impulse. The easiest answer to temptation was always to stay at home and get on with the gardening. One of the good things about St Cadix was that there was no airport within seventy miles of the place. She’d had her share of talking her way on to night flights at the last moment and finding herself the next morning, shattered and delirious, in someone else’s time zone. In St Cadix, she never got further than starting the car. At least, not till now.

She listened to the drumming quake of the sea breaking on the rocks at the entrance to the lagoon; a good sound to go with the doing of something stylish, gay and final. She turned over a card. But all I said was, “Can I see your organ, Vicar?”! Diana laughed, and the rattle in her lungs got mixed up with the sea’s thunder. Woodsmoke ballooned into the room in a sudden downdraught in the chimney. When she opened the kitchen door to clear the smoke, she had to fight the gale, forcing herself against it shoulder to shoulder.

Through the open door, she could see the waves racing in from the sea, the wind raising hackles of surf from their tops like porcupine quills. She wrestled the door shut and stood leaning against it, making a list in her head. She’d need to buy some tights. She’d better take the torch, and a couple of travelling rugs, and her old tennis shoes.

Loading the car, she saw her arrival very clearly. Calliope was parked in a harbour much like St Cadix, and George was downstairs, writing. His baseball cap wagged up at the sound of footsteps on the deck, and she was saying, “I just thought I had some talking to do on my own account.” At three, she locked the cottage and climbed the track in first gear, with the bonnet of the car weaving as the rear wheels spun in mud.

27th March. 1755. Sea Area Wight. Wind SW, Gale 8, moderating to 5 or 6 and veering westerly, imminent. Showers. Visibility moderate to good. Bar. 981mb., rising.

When the first gale warning was issued, on the 24th, George ran Calliope up to the top of a narrow creek on the western neck of Southampton Water. She floated — and then only just — for an hour on either side of high water; for the rest of the time she lay cradled in pungent black ooze. Bubbles of gas broke on the oily surface around her and stiff-legged curlews left their footprints outside her portholes. George put both anchors out and roped the boat to the trees on the windward shore. At the height of the gale, he loafed below in the saloon, with the charcoal fire drawing nicely, the end of Great Expectations within sight, as content with his squelchy berth as a hippo.

He got ashore in the dinghy by hauling himself hand over hand across the mud on a mooring rope. Carrying Vera’s bag of many colours, he walked through the fringe of trees, across a boggy field and into a council estate, where a gang of native children scowled and jeered when he nodded his head and smiled at them as he used to smile his way through the shantytowns of Montedor.

In the telephone kiosk on the corner, the line was dead and the gale blew through the smashed windows. George avoided looking at the small pile of human dung at his feet. Where once there had been a mirror there was now a naked square of hardboard on which someone had scrawled FUCK BLACK PIGS — NF and drawn a swastika with its legs going the wrong way round.

He walked for more than half an hour through a landscape of spraygunned concrete towers before he tracked down a working telephone, from which he called a taxi. When it came, the man stared at him and rudely demanded his fare in advance. The same thing happened at the new hotel near the cathedral in Winchester, where George asked for a single room with a bath. When he said “bath” he watched the girl at Reception fight a losing battle with a snigger.

“I’m living on a boat nowadays, you see,” George said. The girl didn’t soften her expression by a whisker. He paid her with a fifty-pound note and was shown up to a narrow cupboard hardly bigger, at first sight, than the TV set which was the room’s defining feature. He opened the door of the tiny bathroom to the sea-like roar of an odour-extractor-fan. He parked Vera’s bag on the bed and descended to the street in a lift full of foggy muzak.

He found a barber’s and had his hair shampooed and cut and his beard trimmed. George had never taken proper bearings on his beard before. He studied it in the barber’s looking glass with agreeable surprise. Diana had said it was pure silver, and so it was — a birdsnest of bright fusewire. Listening, lulled, to the steady chip-chip-chip of the man’s scissors, he watched himself being sculpted like a hedge. When it was finished, he peered at his face from all sides, gazing at the beard with frank admiration, as if it was the property of somebody else altogether. It had the distinct look of C.-in-C. Western Approaches about it.

“Makes you look a different man, sir,” the barber said. The deference was new and spoken to the beard. George tipped the man five pounds for fixing this lightning promotion.

Bathed, kitted out in his shoregoing suit, flashing the points of his admiral’s beard, he was cock of the walk in the hotel lounge, where he strode through an early package tour of Americans, left his key at Reception and ordered a taxi to Tadfield.

They raced past windblown fields and stands of frantically gesticulating trees. Landspeed was dizzying, too fast for the eye to keep up, after the steady, encroaching motion of a boat on the sea. Searching for a point of focus, some reliable horizon, George settled on a flock of herring gulls, battling against the gale as they followed a plough on a brown hillside.

The journey to Tadfield (he remembered it as a long, slow summer drive through crooked lanes) took less than ten minutes from the Winchester suburbs, and when they reached it George was completely foxed.

“Are you sure?” he said to the driver. He saw a minimarket, a video club and a terrace of breezeblock Costa del Sol-style houses with windy balconies and carports where there should have been a hummocky common of gorse and bracken. He left the car to wait for him on the forecourt of a pub that looked all wrong but had the right name.

Only the church was the same. The same old appeal was going on for the restoration of the roof. A battered cardboard thermometer, roped to a pole and flapping dangerously, showed the fund standing at £2,150. The colours were running from the thumbtacked notice which said something about Bingo. Bingo, indeed. His father wouldn’t have cared for that.

Inside, the smell was as he remembered; a dark, clammy, musty smell of creosote and old bones. His footsteps ringing on the stone, he walked down the aisle to the family pew and knelt there, on a new blue hassock, his hands clasped under his beard. The wind was fussing in the rafters and the Mothers Union banner stirred in the draughts of heavy, ecclesiastical air. Something was missing, though. George sniffed. There wasn’t any incense in it now. He guessed that the bingo-playing rector must be Low.

His father’s voice droned with the wind in the arches and up in the beams. He was still going on about Agape and Eros. The congregation had its thoughts on Sunday dinner. George shut his ears to the sermon and studied the Table of Kindred and Affinity in the prayer-book. He toyed with the notion of marrying his grandmother, his wife’s father’s sister or his brother’s son’s wife. He transferred his gaze from the small print to the tantalizingly exposed ridge of Vivienne Beale’s brassiere-strap under her jumper. He wondered if girls ever farted. He supposed that they must, sometimes; a liberating thought. He tried to imagine Vivienne Beale farting, and couldn’t.

“Eros,” his father said. Distracted for a second, George saw a stone imp with a bow and arrow. Agape sounded vaguely like some sort of tropical fish.

He looked up to find that his father was staring straight at him, singling him out; and in his father’s face there was something that George had never seen there before — a look of troubled, sorrowful fraternity.

He got up stiffly from the pew and walked down the suddenly empty church to the pulpit steps. He climbed into the little wooden crow’s nest, stood in front of the lectern and leaned forward, hands gripping the rails.

“Dearly beloved brethren,” George said in the affectedly resonant voice that his father used for talking in church. The words were echoed by the wind outside. The pulpit felt far higher than it looked from the pews, and lonelier, too. He looked down on the thin scattering of resigned faces, and saw his own, out there in the seventh row, cast in a supercilious schoolboy smile, a trace of pale down on its upper lip. He felt mocked in his eminence. Nobody listened to you, not really, when you talked from the pulpit; you were here to bore people and be misunderstood.

He was glad to get out into the open air. He walked across the churchyard to a row of fresh graves and stood numbly in front of a stone which said:

VIVIENNE JOANNA BEALE

1925–1983

ABSENT IN BODY BUT PRESENT IN SPIRIT

1 Cor. v.3

There were some dead flowers in a jar on the pink quartz chips. So she’d never married. Cancer, presumably, had got her at 58. That was strange as well: George had always thought she was a year older, not a year younger, than himself. She hadn’t even rated an “In Loving Memory”, just that stony quotation from St Paul, poor bitch.

He saw his father marching through the nettles round the side of the church. He was dressed for the wedding, in full regalia, togged out in white and purple and scarlet and gold.

“Daddy—” George said.

“Cut!” shouted Mr Haigh, and a cloud of rooks exploded from the dead elm on boxy wings.

The taxi was waiting. George told the man to drive him back to Winchester, where he gathered his things from the hotel room before returning to the boat.

Now he was ready to go. Calliope was connected to the ground by a single anchor. George sat in the saloon listening to the intestinal slurps and rumbles of the mud around the hull as it yielded the boat, inch by inch, to the rising water.

28th March. 1005. Sea Area Thames. Wind, W 5 locally 6. Visibility good. Bar. 1003mb., rising more slowly.

Tom was doing a steady 65 down the M3 in Trev’s old Commer van. It had taken most of yesterday to find Trev, and then he’d had trouble with the pews. They rattled in the back, half a churchful of them, all solid oak and nicely carved.

He liked driving on the motorway. Once you were in the middle lane with your foot three-quarters down on the pedal, you could let your thoughts wander. Sometimes fifty miles went by without Tom noticing, he was so lost in one of his wrangles. Sometimes he sat alone in the cab arguing with Sheila, sometimes he told stories, sometimes he got hold of an idea and argued it out with himself.

Which was what he was doing today. Trade, he thought, as he drove through the contraflow system round the road works at Sunbury. By Exit 2, he was away, driving on automatic and taking a leisurely stroll round the grand and ornamental garden of his brain.

The thing about Trade was … Everything was in the wrong place. You wanted coffee, it was in Brazil. Or take oil. It was in the Arabian desert, or deep down under the North Sea. Asparagus was in Worcestershire — the wrong place again. What traders did was move things from the wrong place to the right place.

Like the pews. They’d come from a church that was being knocked down in Battersea. As long as they stayed in SW11 they were worth no more than the wood they were made of. But outside of Shaftesbury, there was a bloke turning an old barn into a restaurant. He was crying out for church pews. Shaftesbury, just now, was the right place for pews. With every mile they travelled from London, Tom could feel their value accumulating behind him in the van.

It was just a question of knowing, of getting intelligence about what needed to be moved where. Sometimes it was done on a nod and a wink basis. Sometimes you needed to do divination. Tom had brought his divining pendulum, just in case he needed it to find Sheila’s dad.

Trade. If you squinted at the world right, there was the secret of all that restlessness and motion. Refrigerated lorries full of fish from Grimsby, Russian ships with guns for South America, planeloads of food and blankets for the starving people in Africa, hurtling newspaper vans taking city corners on two wheels … everything was travelling because it was in the wrong place. The fizz and energy of it all was staggering; and it was Traders — like Tom — who kept things spinning, faster and faster, round the spinning globe, moving them into their right places, in vans and ships and trains and planes.

The theory worked with people, too. Think of the Israelites in the Bible, when they were in Egypt. The wrong place. When Moses started marching them across the Red Sea to the promised land, he was taking a trader’s risk. What were they worth in Egypt, under the old pharaohs? Sod all. What were they worth in the promised land? Look at the Rothschilds.

An exit sign to Camberley went by. He was thinking of Sheila’s dad. He was in the wrong place, all right. In Africa, with the baobab trees, you could have put a value on him. But not in England. He was like pews going to rot in Battersea, or coals heaped up, unshipped, in Newcastle. Travelling round in his boat sending postcards, he was like one of those cargoes that get hawked about from port to port with no likely buyers. You’d need to put some hard thought into working out the right place for Sheila’s dad; one thing was certain, as far as Tom was concerned, and Sheila too, really — it wasn’t Clapham.

Still, there was plenty of time to divine that. So long as he was out of the house before Tom’s daughter was born. Which was another thing. Sheila didn’t know she was going to have a girl, but Tom did. She liked the not knowing, so he’d divined it when she was asleep, holding the pendulum over the little bulge of her pregnancy. There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt about it: it had gone backwards and forwards, steady as a clock. A boy would have made it go round and round. So he had to watch himself now: he was always wanting to say “she” and remembering just in time to say “it”.

Someone had said once that dust was matter in the wrong place.

Tom took the A303 at the end of the motorway. The countryside looked as spick and span as a new toy in the buttery morning light. Grazing sheep stood in the puddles of their shadows, and the sun, shining on a chalky hill, made the grass wink and ripple like the Serpentine. The only thing missing was skylarks. Tom saw a jay, two kestrels, a magpie and a big brown hawk that looked like somebody’s overcoat out for a spin on its own. He reckoned it must be a buzzard of some sort. Beyond Andover he stopped for petrol and took in a few deep and happy lungfuls of high-octane country air.

He reached Shaftesbury before noon and found the barn. The bloke helped him to unload the pews from the back of the van and paid in tenners. Tom stood in the sun, counting off the stack of notes. He liked money — the snakeskin feel of the paper, the finicky printed pictures. Like the one of Florence Nightingale and the moustached man with the bandaged head sitting up in bed in the Crimea. He’d asked Sheila once, “What’s on the back of a ten pound note?” She’d never noticed, which was odd since writers were supposed to be observant.

But then money was only a symbol. It was like everything else — you had to keep it on the move to make it work for you. A roll of the stuff in your back pocket was just lazy money. Think. Tom leaned against the side of the van, wrinkling his eyes against the light. What was going cheap in Dorset that people in London would give their eye-teeth for? It came to him in a stroke: the answer was all round him, in the sweet, animal, country smell of the air in his nose. He walked back to the barn and called to the bloke inside. “Hey, d’you know a place where I could pick up a ton or two of horse manure?”

It was nearly three o’clock before he was on his way again, with the van windows wound down to let out the pong. He stopped briefly at Fontmell Magna, where he saw a British Legion Bazaar going on in the parish hall. He bought a pair of old weighing scales with nice brass weights, a home-made fruit cake for Sheila and a fluffy monkey for his daughter.

At Weymouth he drove along the quay, past the moored yachts and the Sealink ferries, to the harbourmaster’s office. The harbourmaster was talking to a ship on his radio mike, saying Roger and Over rather more often than Tom suspected was strictly necessary. He looked at the photographs that were pinned to the fibreboard wall — black and white ones of old wrecks, coloured ones of a lifeboat in rough seas.

“Yes?”

“I’m looking for a boat with two masts. There’s an old bloke on it. On his own—”

“Calliope. Name of … Grey? G. Grey?”

“Yes,” Tom said, surprised by how quick the harbourmaster was on the uptake.

“There was a lady in last night, looking for him. Is she connected with you?”

“No,” Tom said. “I don’t think so.” Not unless he meant Sheila. But he couldn’t mean Sheila. It took some of the bloom off the expedition to find that he wasn’t alone on it.

“We went through it all then. He left here on the … 23rd, before the gale. I tried calling the Coastguard. He hasn’t reported in to them since the 22nd, when he left Lyme Regis. They put out a call for him on the VHF, but couldn’t raise him yesterday. He’s probably sitting out on a mooring somewhere darning his socks. How long’s he been out of touch, then?”

“Not all that long,” Tom was thinking of the stream of postcards; it would be stretching it a bit to say that Sheila’s dad had really been out of touch at all.

“I wouldn’t fuss yourself. They’re a funny lot, the single-handers. Especially the old fellers. They’re always disappearing and cropping up again in places where you least expect them. Bane of my life.”

“I’ll go further down the coast,” Tom said. “Try there.”

“You’d be looking for a needle in a haystack. He’ll be in the Solent now. You’d have to go to Lymington, Yarmouth, Cowes, Buckler’s Hard, Hamble, Pompey, Chichester Harbour — and I haven’t even started.” He wore the broad complacent smile of the man who’s sorry but can’t help.

“I’ll have to work it out,” Tom said.

“The lady who was in here looking for him. She had the look of someone. That singer who used to be on the television. Julie Whatsername.”

“Yeh?”

“Nightfall,” the harbourmaster said.

Tom took himself off to a café on the seafront, where he sat with a cup of weak tea, staring at the road atlas. Some kids were playing on the Pac-Man machine, which was keeping up a steady gobble-gobble-bleep of electronic noise. He got out his divining pendulum.

It was an old King Edward aluminium cigar tube, really. Tom had filled the bottom of it with molten lead and drilled a hole in the screw cap. He’d tied a length of nylon fishing line to a shirt button and threaded it through the hole. Letting the pendulum dangle on six inches of line, he held it over the atlas.

He was thinking a bit about Sheila’s dad, but mostly he was thinking of the boat. He thought: oak, larch, teak, mahogany.

The pendulum gave a definite tremble over Christchurch, but that was probably just an old echo, like the useless twitch that it made over Weymouth itself. He moved it along the coastline, almost touching the map with it, concentrating. Tom shut his eyes. He felt the pendulum quiver — like a tiny electric shock. Then it started to swing in steady circles, round and round and round and round, the nylon tugging between his thumb and forefinger. Tom looked to see where it was on the atlas. It was left of Southampton.

He put the pendulum away and finished his tea. On the way back to the van he saw a rack of postcards in a shop. He bought We can’t have that dangling — it’ll have to come off! to send to Trev.

28th March. 1015. Sea Area Wight. Wind W, veering NW, 4–5. Visibility good. Bar. 1008mb., rising.

In Lymington, Diana slammed the car door shut and went out to brave another dreary yacht marina. They were all the same — the same demented cowbell noise of metal rigging banging into metal masts, the same breezy good old boys in faded denims and braided captains’ hats. The marinas were uglier by far than the caravan sites. Every once-pretty river was spoiled by them. Where there had been rushbeds as thick as harvest corn, and seapink and milkwort and herb robert, there was now just pontoon on pontoon of expensive plastic toys. She must have seen millions of pounds’ worth of them already — idle, charmless things that tinkled in the wind and looked like nothing so much as dollops of fiddled income tax.

She had woken in the hotel room at Poole feeling tired, helpless, out of place. The morning sun had robbed her quest of point and shadow. Over the Nescafe and stale croissant that passed for a “continental breakfast”, it looked a poor sad thing, too naked to face without a wince of embarrassment. This chasing after George only succeeded in making Diana seem more fractured, more incomplete to herself. Better to go botanising alone for lichens, or stay up all night waiting for the liquid wink of badgers’ eyes in the grotto.

The lusts of the flesh draw us to rove abroad; but when the time is past, what earnest thou home but a burdened conscience and a distracted heart?

Yes, but the trouble was that she was haunted by the dangerous line. Without a friend, thou canst not well live.

So she paid her bill with a mint American Express card and plugged on from marina to marina, putting the same unhopeful question at every place.

She opened the door of the blue Portakabin that served as an office. “I am looking,” she said, as she always said, “for a yacht called Calliope.”

28th March. 1020. Sea Area Dover. Wind W, 5–6. Visibility good. Bar. 1003mb., rising.

George had sailed through the night, cat-napping when he could. The swell left by the gale was still running, in steep black hills as cleanly contoured as desert dunes. They came racing from behind in the dark, seizing the boat in exhilarating swoops and plummetings. He found Antares on the sky, and tried to keep it in the starboard shrouds. With the wind astern and the swell on the quarter, the sea gathered him in and swept him headlong up the Channel.

At ten in the morning he found the Rye fairway buoy. The swell was breaking on the shallow sand of the bay and George was wary of tackling the harbour entrance. He called the harbourmaster on the radio. No problem, the voice said: there was plenty of water, the approach was to be taken carefully on 329°, and George was to moor at the piles below the office before going on upriver to the town.

He clung to the bearing and watched the needle on the echo sounder sink lower and lower down the face of the dial. He could see surf ahead, stained brown with sand, and a wooden dolphin marking the entrance to the harbour. Calliope switch-backed in the swell. He hadn’t eaten for … he couldn’t remember when. He felt too jumpily alert for his own good. 325°. 334°. 329°. He locked the boat on the magic number and saw the surf part to disclose a narrow, canal-like avenue of smooth water dead ahead.

A man in uniform was waiting to take his ropes at the piles.

“Thanks,” George said. “How much do I owe you? — I’m only staying for one night—” and saw that the man was not the harbourmaster but a customs officer.

“If I might come aboard, sir?” He was already there; a heavy man whose big pink marshmallow face looked innocently mismatched with the black serge and the clipboard that made up the rest of him. “Come far today?”

“Just from the Solent.”

“And where, exactly, on the Solent, sir, did you come from?”

“Oh … Southampton Water. The Itchen side. Eling, I think it was called.”

“When did you leave?”

“About six o’clock last night.”

“And what sort of weather did you have, sir?”

George shrugged. “You know. Much like it is now.”

“You tell me, sir.”

“Why the interrogation?”

“It’s not an interrogation. I’m just curious, sir.”

“The wind was westerly, Force 4. Heavy swell from the sou’west. Visibility good. I was able to steer by the stars.”

The man was making notes with a biro. George’s temper was fraying, but he ached to be rid of the man’s officious bulk and felt that compliance was the safest route.

“This is a big boat for one man to handle on his own, isn’t it, sir?”

“I manage.”

“D’you mind if I have a look-see below?”

“No.”

But all the warmth and friendliness of the saloon vanished with the man’s presence there. George felt he was watching his life being burgled before his eyes. He saw the saloon as the man saw it: its untidy scatter of books and discarded clothes, the empty whisky tumbler, the unplumped cushions, the cracked case of the transistor radio, the saucepan which had dislodged itself from the galley and fallen under the saloon table. The man was looking at Vera’s picture.

“Nice woodwork, sir.”

He opened lockers and drawers. In the forecabin, he rummaged through George’s socks and underpants. He lifted a floorboard and found the wine cellar in the forward bilges.

“Duty paid on these, sir?”

George pointed to the name of the English shipper on a bottle of Pomerol. The man nodded and turned to the chain locker.

George said: “You’ll find a tin full of money there, under a pile of chain.”

“Will I, sir?” The man’s eyes were as bland as a pair of poached eggs. He opened the locker door and reached inside. “Feels as if you’ve got a bit of a soft patch in the stem here …”

“I had the boat surveyed six weeks ago, thank you,” George said. “By a professional.”

“Oh, well—” the customs man’s voice was muffled by the locker. “You’ve nothing to worry about, have you?” He retrieved the Huntley & Palmer’s biscuit tin and brushed the rust off it. “Would you like to open that for me, please, sir?”

George did so.

“Crikey,” the man said. The sight of the money made his face turn suddenly into that of a boy. He was a fat milk monitor in short trousers. “How much you got in there, then?”

“Oh — about nineteen thousand pounds. Give or take, you know.”

“Some of it’s American money.”

“Yes. I think there are fifteen thousand dollars there; the rest’s in sterling.”

“In a tin.”

“Well, one has to keep it somewhere.”

“This is just what you take on holiday, is it?” The man laughed as if he’d said something immensely clever. Then, as if George had failed to get the joke, he solemnly elaborated it. “You could buy yourself a few ice-creams with that, couldn’t You?”

George was a little consoled. The man’s official dignity had crumpled so completely in the face of the money in the tin. The saloon, too, was beginning to look like the saloon again.

“You hear of people keeping it under the mattress, but …”

George put the lid back on the tin. He said, “Is there anything else you’d like to see?”

The man was rubbing his upper lip with his finger. “What do you need with all that money on a boat?”

“I don’t know,” George said. “I mean, I don’t. But it’s here. And it’s perfectly legal.”

“Oh, I wasn’t saying that it wasn’t,” the man said. He gazed at the flaked paint of the floral pattern on the tin. “Where’s the engine on this?”

George showed him to the wheelhouse, pulled up the floorboards and watched as the man climbed down and sat astride the engine in the gloom, puffing.

“You haven’t got a torch?”

George passed him the torch. He shone the beam on the batteries, the fuel tanks, the stowed electric generator. He looked up at George, his schoolboy face streaked with oil.

“From Southampton Water?”

“Yes.”

“At night?”

“Yes.”

“All by yourself?”

“Yes.” George laughed now.

“I don’t get it.” He hauled himself out of the engine room and shook himself down. As he left the boat, he stared at George’s face.

“You spend a lot of time abroad, then, sir?”

“I used to live in Africa, until last year.”

“Africa. Yes. That’d explain it.”

“Explain what?” George said, but the man didn’t say. His jaundice tan, George assumed.

He motored on up the river, determined not to let the customs man spoil the morning. He ran close to the coaster berths, where the wind had the smell of sawn pine in it and slowed past the rotting wooden skeleton of a trawler whose owner had abandoned it to the wide saltings. The spring tide was flooding through the banks of grass and reeds; the miles of marshy flatland brimmed with water like the blistered silvering on an old mirror. Ahead, Rye was a floating pyramid of rust-coloured roofs, castle battlements, a church tower with the white and red flag of St George flying from it, a personal salute. George put the wheel hard a-port and fed Calliope into a muddy dyke that trailed round the backs of cottages where toy windmills spun and garden gnomes fished in goldfish ponds.

The customs officer was waiting for him at Strand Quay. He had an alsatian dog with him, and caught George’s ropes, smiling, insufferably. “You don’t mind my bringing the dog, do you, sir? One can’t be too thorough, can one?”

Standing in the cockpit in full view of the town, George felt conspicuously criminalized. He was momentarily flummoxed by the sight of the dog climbing backwards down the ladder with clumsy expertise, its paws slipping on the rungs. He’d never seen a ladder-climbing dog before. The dog gave him a surly sideways nod and strolled into the wheelhouse. The customs man said, “We’ll only take a few minutes of your time, sir.”

Could the Dunnetts ever have had marijuana on the boat? It seemed utterly improbable, but then so did the customs man and his precocious dog. George said, “I suppose you’re only doing your job.”

Who owned the boat before the Dunnetts? He felt already guilty. Something was going to be found — something he was sure that he ought to be able to remember if he could only pierce his paralysing absent-mindedness. He tried to remember the name of his mother’s solicitor. It escaped him completely. What had he done

He followed the man and the dog down into the saloon. Lockers were being opened, drawers pulled out.

“Don’t mind us,” said the customs man. The dog stood mansized, paws up against the bookshelves, going through Conrad, Dickens and Kipling, its tail tucked politely between its hind legs.

“It’s just that I’ve got children, sir.”

“So have I—” George watched as the man removed the batteries from the radio and inspected them closely one by one.

“It sickens me, sir, the tragedies you see caused by drugs nowadays. With kids. Unemployed. Being exploited by some rich bastard feathering his own dirty nest. I don’t suppose you’d know, would you, sir, what it’s like to watch a kid turn into a junky? Watch him lose all sense of reality and just stand by helpless?”

“I am not a rich bastard. I am not feathering a dirty nest.”

“No, sir. I’m sure you’re not, sir. I was only speaking generally. I just happen to believe that any human being who destroys reality for other people deserves to be treated like … scum, sir.”

“I am not what you think I am at all—” George was shaking.

“No, sir. I think we’ll look in the bilges now, if you wouldn’t mind.”

The dog stared reproachfully at George with eyes as big as Angela’s; and it was to the dog that George said, “I’ve never had anything to do with drugs of any kind in my entire life.”

“Very wise of you, sir.”

At the end of the search, the dog relaxed. It stood with its tongue lolling, panting gently, like a pet. George reached out to pat it, and the dog grinned.

“What’s its name?” he said, desperate to establish some bridge between himself and these extraordinary inquisitors.

The man didn’t reply. He sat on the starboard settee berth, frowning at George’s waistband. The dog lifted a paw, which George shook, comforted by the feel of the cool pads on his fingers.

“Down!” the man said. The dog telegraphed an apology to George and stood staring at the roofbeams, its tail wagging.

“It’s immigrants, isn’t it?”

“No!” George said.

“Whatever you say, sir. But from now on, sir, this vessel is going to be watched. And when I say watched, I mean watched. You go into any port in British territorial waters, and you’ll find, I think, sir, that the Customs service is going to be taking quite a bit of interest in your movements. We’re not that stupid, sir. At this particular moment in time, you are the Master of a perfectly clean vessel. But you’ve given me grounds for a reasonable suspicion that this boat has been used for the illegal shipment of goods or persons.”

“There are no grounds at all!”

“I won’t argue that point with you, sir.”

The man left, the dog scrambling ahead of him up the ladder. George returned to the ransacked saloon. He felt broken. All the people he thought of as his companions on the voyage seemed to have jumped ship, leaving in their place a fat man in black serge who sat there, talking, talking, talking in the dead tones of a speak-your-weight machine. The air in the boat tasted poisoned. He burned his throat with whisky, but it didn’t help. He went out to the cockpit where he clung to the mizzen boom, trying to shake the customs man out of his head.

There was a youth on the quay — one of the hands-in-pockets mooning crew who seemed to hang round every pier and jetty on the edge of England gazing wistfully at boats. This one was staring at Calliope.

“Yours?”

“Yes,” George said.

“She’s nice.”

“Come on board if you like.” Anyone would do — any ordinary human voice or human smell to occupy the dreadful space opened by the customs man. The boy nodded wordlessly and stepped down the ladder. The soles of his training shoes were coming apart from the uppers. He poked ignorantly, admiringly, around the wheelhouse. George named things for him, and heard his voice tremble as he spoke.

“How far could you go in this, then?”

“As far as you liked.”

“Further than France?”

“Oh, yes. Much further.”

The boy let out a small, sad, envious whistle. “Fark,” he said.

George showed him down to the saloon. The boy looked round him.

“You read all them books?”

“There are still some I haven’t got round to yet.”

“Fark.”

His name was Rick. He had been a trainee fitter, but had lost his job last August. He lived, he said, on something called Supplementary Benefit. It didn’t seem to have done him much good. Clouts of greasy fair hair hung round his ears and his beaked face looked starved of blood. George fed him with Chivas Regal, which he sipped at as if he had to make the glass eke out over a long day.

George said: “Would you like to make a bit of money — fifty pounds, say — for an afternoon’s work?”

“What doing?”

“Shopping. Just in Rye. I’d give you a list and some money.”

“Fark, yes.”

“Look—” He took a book down from the shelf and hunted through the pages at the back. “It’d save time if I just ticked things on here. You … can read, can you?”

“‘Course.’ He took the book from George and demonstrated. “13 prawn curry with rice, 11 drums parmesan, 1 packet mashed potato, 6 mango chutney, 1 packet vegisalt, 12 Jiffy lemons …”

“Yes — I’m so sorry. Of course you can. It’s just that lots of people can’t … where I come from.”

“Where’s that, then?”

“Africa.”

“Fark.”

George worked on the printed list, putting ticks by it and changing numbers. “I’m going to have to give you rather a lot of money — two or three hundred pounds …”

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

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

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

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

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

“The real thing,” George said.

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

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

“Rather you than me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where are you trying to get to?”

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

Tom gave him a new fiver.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“¿Qué?” he shouted.

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

“Gracias! Si, por favor!”

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

“¿Quiere más? Hay mucho!”

“No, es perfecto! Muchas gracias.”

“¿Adonde va?”

“Bastante lejos.”

“¿En ese pequeño barco?”

“Es bastante grande para mí.”

“Buena suerte!”

“Gracias! Y a usted!”

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

Soaring clear of the falling ground, Calliope was flying, windborne, sustained on her diaphanous skin of blue water. Somewhere deep down, deeper than you could imagine, lay the dark and sludgy plain of ocean — the bottom of the world. Floating over it, George felt the floor sway a little underfoot. If there were monsters down there in the slime, he guessed they must be friendly monsters; blind herbivores, nourished on mud.

Invisible tunnymen were talking on the radio still. He switched them off — he had no need of other voices now. He stepped below, poured himself a prim quarter tumblerful of Chivas Regal, and watched the whisky wrinkle in the glass. Beyond the porthole, the sea was beginning to darken and the rags of hazy cloud were turning ochre and mauve.

“Cheers,” he said and took a single sip. The last dickering beam of sunlight was lighting the wool of the Wolof rug on the floor. He sat, arms spreadeagled on the starboard side settee, and felt the valves of his heart pumping blood in foxtrot time. The sea chuckled at his back, the abyss opened under the keel; but for now, with the barograph needle inking an even track up at the top of the turning drum, George was home and dry.