Foreign Land

CHAPTER EIGHT

Easter, only six weeks off, was early that year, and people in St Cadix were starting to talk of The Season. The Stevensons had flown to Lanzarote, but Rhoda Bowles was back from the Seychelles and was busy stocktaking at Aquarius Gifts. William Pitchford abandoned the big canvas, “Homage to de Kooning”, on which he’d been working since November, and settled down to doing square-riggers on panes of Cornish slate. He usually managed a dozen before lunch. At the Polgollan Pottery, Mike and Tricia Hawksby spent most of their time fighting. Mike threw strings of lopsided mugs on which he gouged “St Cadix” with a screwdriver; Tricia drowned them in a viscous oatmeal glaze which stuck to the clay in gobbets and dribbles like dried fishglue. When she stacked them on the shelves of the kiln, she thought of them burning there, purified and broken by the flames. “Thank Heaven for small mercies,” said Laura Nash, “at least the Hawksbys don’t have children.”

At the Falcon’s Nest, Ronnie Swinglehurst finally got rid of the builders who’d been putting up rustic beams in the saloon bar, now The Pyrates Snug. At Trade Winds, Kitty Lane-Williams died of breast cancer without bothering to tell anyone, even Betty Castle. At Heatherlea, Robert Collins changed the Porsche for an Audi, which he bought in London on his annual trip to the Boat Show.

At Harmony Cottage, Diana Pym planted a young ginkgo tree. When the southerly gales came, in the wake of an anticyclone centred over Denmark, she stood in front of the sapling and tried to shield it from the wind with her arms. She rigged up an old door to protect it, but the door blew down, narrowly missing the little tree. Finally she drove the car across the bumpy turf, over the lip of a granite outcrop, and parked it beside the ginkgo. She tore the exhaust system out on a rock, but the tree was safe, and Diana Pym spent the rest of the morning indoors, tippling gently and watching the sea explode at the edge of the garden in rocketing bursts of spindrift taller than the house.

At Persimmons, Roy Dunnett sent away for holiday brochures advertised in the colour magazines of the Sunday papers. He sat wrapped in blankets, wheezing a little, surrounded by pictures of people walking in Nepal, pony-trekking in the Andes and hurtling down the Colorado River on rafts.

Angry children from St Austell stormed the village on motorbikes and balkanized the Yacht Club flagpole, the telephone box by the church, the gothic ladies’ lavatory and the noticeboard that said “What’s On In St Cadix.” They regrouped round the steps of the marine aquarium, where Olivia Jerrold swore that she had seen them smoking heroin cigarettes, and roared off up the Mevagissey road.

At Malibu, Connie Lisle counted out her remaining tablets of Tuinal. There were twelve. She laid them in pairs on the bedside table and put them back in the bottle. The Times Educational Supplement arrived by the second post in a wrapper addressed to Miss C. M. J. Lisle, M.A. She took it up to bed with her and read it from cover to cover.

At Thalassa, six tea chests arrived from Africa: a whole life, docketed, scribbled over with hieroglyphs in mauve crayon, and tied up fast with strong Manila cord. George wrenched their tops off with a claw hammer, and the room bloomed with a smell as stirring and sharp as that of a lover. The air tasted of volcanic dust, oily mangoes, hibiscus and carrion. His squashed cap lay on top of one of the chests and he shook it into shape. The stitching of the letters was starting to come adrift; it now said

HOLSUM — AMERCA’S #1B EAD

Comfortably hatted, with the peak pulled down low over his eyes, George began to unpack. His most ordinary things had taken on a peculiar patina in the course of their ocean passage to Cornwall. He gazed wonderingly at the cracked ivory back of his old hairbrush. He found his squash racket stuffed down the side of the chest. He bounced the strings against his left palm and wallopped a volley in a low curve over the top of the dead TV screen. He heard, just beside him, the slap and squeak of Teddy’s plimsolls as the ball zapped back off the wall from half the world away.

The narrow margin of water between Calliope and the quay was more of a step than a jump; but once aboard the ketch George felt that he was a long way out. The moment he unlocked the door of the wheelhouse he turned into a trespasser. He went through the boat on tiptoe and was shy of touching things. When the cabin floor shifted very slightly underfoot, he grabbed at the rope on the coachroof — dizzied not so much by the motion of the water as by the intimacy on which he had intruded.

There was something indecent and forlorn about the boat. Stepping inside it was like reading another man’s love letter. Every time he opened a locker or looked at a fitting, George saw Roy Dunnett making one more craven appeal to his wife.

The poor booby. Everything was new: new radio, new autopilot, new echo sounder, new brass binnacle compass. An unopened parcel from a yacht chandlers’ in Lymington turned out to contain a fringed blue deck awning; in a cardboard box there were courtesy flags for France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, each one sheathed in tissue paper. The fridge in the galley had never been used. On top of it was a patent gadget with gimbals for keeping cocktails steady in high seas.

Yet the boat had been nowhere. The leatherbound ship’s log in the wheelhouse didn’t have a single entry in it. There was one chart in the drawer under the chart table. It was of the English Channel from Falmouth to Plymouth, and was mint except for a pencil line connecting St Cadix to the Gribbin Head and the Fowey estuary twelve miles away, with the figure “069 (Magnetic)” written neatly above the line. This cautious little voyage must have been just as speculative a projection as the Greek flag or the South Biscay Pilot on a bookshelf in the saloon.

Rootling deeper in the bowels of the boat, George could smell Dunnett’s fear of the sea. He unearthed a manual called How to Survive in Your Liferaft, enough flares to light the sky from horizon to horizon, five different brands of pills for travel sickness, a lot of tubes of glue.

It was rum. Cynthia Dunnett, the inamorata for whom this extravagant fantasy had been furnished (on an RAF pension?), went about in hand-me-downs and smelled of cabbage. Roy Dunnett must have imagined her swanning round the Cyclades with a martini in her hand — just as he’d imagined himself clinging to the wreckage, lungs full of salt water, shouting in the dark.

George could feel the man, unpleasantly close at hand. Calliope had been Dunnett’s last bid for a new start. Now that he owned Dunnett’s boat, was he saddled with Dunnett’s hopeless fantasies too? More to the point, was it something dim and Dunnettlike in himself that had drawn him to the quay in the first place to moon over this tubby dreamboat?

He hadn’t bargained on finding a sitting tenant aboard. Trying to evict him, George screwed open the portholes to freshen the trapped air of the saloon. He pushed up the glass hatch over the forecabin and carried out the Dunnett-mattresses and Dunnett-cushions on to the deck. He made a pile of Dunnett-things, beginning with the framed colour photo of Cynthia Dunnett in yellow Wellington boots; the twin braided yachting caps, made by Locks the hatters and stamped “CD.” and “R.D.” in gold leaf on the hatbands; and the South Biscay Pilot, whose flyleaf was inscribed, “Darling — here’s hoping. From your own Roy. Xmas 1980”.

Well, George was hoping too. At the end of the day, he rang the wing commander.

“Don’t you bother, please, old boy—” Over the phone, the bronchial voice sounded like the chinking of dead leaves in a breeze. “Anything you don’t want, just pitch it over the side. You know how upset Cynthia would be to see it in the house—”

Since the day when George paid him in cash for the boat, there’d been a fraternal chumminess in Dunnett’s manner. George didn’t care for it; he felt he was being treated as a partner in crime.

“I expect it’s all a bit of a cabbage patch for you at present,” Dunnett said.

“Cabbage patch?” George was thinking of the smell of Persimmons.

“What we used to call a low-flying raid over enemy territory.” He giggled nervously and hung up.

George took the floorboards out of the boat and worked in the bilges, pulling out knots of oily filth with his hands. In the engine compartment under the wheelhouse, he found something unpleasant that looked as if it had probably been a dead rat. He wiped and pocketed a George V half-crown and an ear ring. He sluiced out the bilges with a borrowed hose and pumped them dry. He got down on his knees and sniffed under the joists. No trace of Dunnett.

After three days, his hands were raw, his palms were cracked, but George’s head was blessedly empty. Cleaning out the boat, he found he’d swabbed and scoured a lot of the grimier recesses in himself. He rubbed sweet-scented beeswax deep into the grain of the mahogany panels and polished the wood to a dark and glassy bloom. He liked to watch the film of Brasso first cloud, then dry to a dusty white crust on the tarnished metal. Gently, he washed off the caked carbon from the tulip glasses of the oil lamps in warm soapsuds. Small waves chuckled and gossipped companionably round the hull, and vagrant sunbeams from the portholes skedaddled up and down the saloon as the boat tipped on the wake of a passing coaster. George was lost to the world in his mellow wooden cave. Crouched on all fours with a fistful of dusters, he put his weight behind his polishing arm and whistled “Tiger Rag” through his teeth.

The hour after church on Sunday morning was a busy time at the Royal St Cadix Yacht Club. Roberts, the bar steward, was setting up a line of pink gins, shaking beads of angostura bitters from the glasses. George was talking to Rupert Walpole. At the end of the bar, old Freddie Corquordale was reading bits out loud from the Sunday Telegraph.

“Just a small sherry for me. Dry, please,” said Verity Caine to Denis Wright, whose round it was.

“Of course, the computer’s only as good as the stuff you feed into it. Rubbish in, rubbish out, as they say—” Rupert Walpole said to George.

To anyone who would listen, Freddie Corquordale said: “‘Des Hubble (26), a Camden social worker, told the court that in his view glue-sniffing was a consequence of government policy on youth unemployment.’ I think if I were Des Hubble (26) and that was a fair sample of my wit and wisdom, I’d be rather inclined to pipe down.”

Betty Castle and Mrs Downes both laughed politely. You had to humour Freddie Corquordale, especially on Sundays. It had been on a Sunday, at about this time last year, that Daphne had died of a kidney thing.

“What blazing rot!” Freddie said, and sipped happily at his whisky and splash.

George said, “What sort of annual tonnage are you handling?”

“Oh, we topped the million mark for the first time last year.”

“Hey—Montedor!” called Freddie Corquordale; “wasn’t that your old patch?”

“Yes—” George said.

“There’s something about it here. Doesn’t make much sense: ruddy printers have ballsed the thing up, as per usual. Here … you look.”

It was two paragraphs at the bottom of the Foreign News page. It was datelined Lagos, and the tiny headline just said “Muslim Riots”.

Reports last week from Bom Porto, capital of Montedor, indicated that a rising of Muslim wolf tirbesmen in the northern city of Guia had been successfully put down by gov-the rioters were estimated at over ernment troops. Casualties among 100 dead: there were no reports of causalities among government forces. A curfew has been imposed in urban areas.

The small West African state of Montedor has a long history of Catholic, Creole population of the tension between the traditionally coast and the Muslim tribesmen of ence from Portugal in 1975 and is the interior. It gained independverely affected by drought since the interior. It gained independan independent Marxist republic.

(AP)

“Locals playing up?” said Rupert Walpole, reading over George’s shoulder.

“Scotch, wasn’t it — George?” said Denis Wright.

“Some of those printers, you know, they fly about the place in their own ruddy aeroplanes,” said Freddie Corquordale. “There was a fellow on the television, not an aitch to his name, worked on some rag or other — he had a private jet. Bought the damn thing out of his wages.”

George stared at the lines of butchered print. He felt wobbly on his feet. The thing was — just awful. It was like suddenly spotting your own car in a television picture of a smash on a motorway.

“Sorry, would you excuse me?” he said, and walked clumsily across to the table where newspapers and magazines were stacked in orderly ranks like tiles on a roof. He searched through the Observer and the Sunday Times. No word of Montedor. It wasn’t surprising. The place didn’t have oil fields, or British “kith and kin” to give it human interest; Montedor was the sort of country where you could have a massacre without anyone minding very much. George’s anxiety gave way to petulance: what did they mean—“a small West African state”? It was twice as big as England.

“The other papers don’t seem to have picked it up,” he said, going back to the bar, where Freddie Corquordale was reading out something about women priests.

“Bad as that, is it?” said Rupert Walpole. “Lucky you got out when the going was good.”

“I was in Iraq when they bumped off young Feisal,” Denis Wright said.

“He is a ninny, that man,” said Freddie Corquordale; “our current A.B. of C.”

So Peres had got his bloodbath. It was just as Teddy had feared. Two years ago, he’d tried to block Peres’s appointment as Minister of National Defence; but President Varbosa had fallen for Peres like a schoolgirl with a crush. In the Club Nautico, Teddy had said, “What can you do, George? To Varbosa, Peres’s shit smells like roses.”

It was true, too. The president couldn’t contain Peres. Before Independence, Varbosa had been fine, as a man of words. His poems had been published in Brazilian magazines. He coined the slogans and wrote all the pamphlets for PAIM. He spoke, sometimes brilliantly, in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau. His handsome face looked good in photographs, in which he cradled a machine gun like a Madonna with a child. The gun was always lent to Varbosa for the occasion: he was too short-sighted to handle firearms for real.

After Independence, Varbosa turned peacock. He adored Pan-African conferences and flights to New York in the antique presidential Boeing. He looked across to Zaire and hankered after Mobutu’s trappings of office. Varbosa too wanted gold bathtaps and huge motorcades; he loved to see his own name painted on the mountainsides, and it was Peres’s men who did the painting.

It wouldn’t be hard to persuade the president that his reputation could only be embellished by slaughtering Wolofs in a show of manly strength; like the feeble artist he was, Varbosa thrilled to the idea of decisive, purifying action. “Blood” was a magic word in his poems. A guerrilla ambush was never just a guerrilla ambush to Aristide Varbosa; it was a Catholic mass, with mission school notions of atonement and redemption blooming from the snouts of automatic rifles.

Advised by Teddy, the president was a genial, pacific soul who’d once asked George if he knew the work of Baudelaire-Rimbaud, a singular poet whom George had decided to leave politely intact. But advised by Peres … George didn’t dare to take the thought further. He felt helplessly distant. He saw the road to Guia, the Cuban soldiers in flappy green fatigues, the hovering helicopter gunship, its rotors stirring the red dust in its shadow like a cloud of cayenne pepper; but the picture was creased and its colour already fading … even Vera, in the passenger seat beside him … even she was beginning to blur.

“How’s the fitting-out going?” said Verity Caine. “I keep on seeing you down on the quay.”

“Oh … tophole, thanks,” George said, trying to bring Vera back into sharp focus again. Pulling himself together, he said: “I need to buy some new warps. Where’s the best place round here for rope?”

At two, just as Roberts was ringing time on the ship’s bell which hung among the liqueurs, Connie Lisle came into the bar and bought a half-bottle of vodka.

“Throwing a party?” said Freddie Corquordale, and winked at Denis Wright.

Miss Lisle bristled from inside her plastic mac and her smile was a quick, nervous twist of the lips. To Roberts she said, “Thanks so much—” then, “Thanks very much indeed.” When she left, everyone said goodbye with an exaggerated cordiality that made up for not speaking to her.

“That’s an odd bod,” Freddie Corquordale said.

“Connie used to be a headmistress.” Betty Castle was looking at George.

“Bluestocking type.” Freddie Corquordale had evidently met many such ladies in his time.

“Comprehensive, of course,” said Betty Castle.

“Verity’s no bluestocking, are you, dear?”

“No, Freddie, I haven’t got a brain in my head. As you know perfectly well.”

At Thalassa, George wrote to Vera as the afternoon darkened. He framed each new word with his pen as deliberately as if he was phrasing an anonymous ransom note. St Cadix was lonely … his things had arrived … he’d bought a boat … seeing a passing reference to Montedor in the papers had made him feel homesick … he’d love to hear Vera’s news. He mentioned Teddy, but crossed out that sentence. He rewrote the letter in Portuguese and read it over. It looked perfectly innocuous; boring enough to make a secret policeman yawn. He hoped the policeman was a paranoid fiction.

No-one tampered with anybody’s letters in the Montedor that George knew. But the country of the Sunday Telegraph report was not the one he knew: the scary thing about those two scrambled paragraphs was that they made Montedor sound just like any other flimsy, tarpaper Third World state — a cockleshell nation that would capsize at a puff of wind from the wrong quarter. He’d been in places like that and knew how appallingly quickly they tipped over: one morning you woke to shooting in the streets; in a week you’d got used to the sight of men you’d once met being blindfolded for their public executions in the sandy town square. But not — surely — in Montedor? Please not in Montedor.

George read his letter again. If things really were still all right, Vera would be flummoxed by it — it sounded half-baked. He was cheered up by the thought of her sitting out on the loggia reading it, her tongue searching round her upper lip, her eyes wrinkled tightly in the glare. Where is George at? She’d smooth the paper flat and leave it on the table in the tall, airy room at the front of the house, pausing over it each time she passed. In the evening, she’d show it to Teddy. Between them, they’d figure it out.

All through the morning, Penhaligon’s Taxi (“Funerals and Weddings Fully Catered For”) kept up a shuttle service in the drizzle between Thalassa and the quay. The tea chests emptied and the boat settled on its waterline as George loaded her with his cargo of precious junk. The tide was on the ebb, and by lunchtime he was standing on the edge of the dripping quay wall, lowering stuff down to the deck in Vera’s bag at the end of a rope. Herring gulls honked and wheezed over his head. He scrambled down the slippery ladder, bruising his shins, and carried another armful of books and trinkets into the dry of the cabin.

Working in the rain, he brought his life aboard; though, for a man as tall and loosely constructed as George, his life was rather on the small side. Piled up in tidy heaps in the saloon, it was, as lives went, a modest affair. There seemed to be hardly more of it than when he’d first packed up his things in a trunk and sent them Passenger Luggage in Advance to Pwllheli.

He spread the striped Wolof rug on the saloon floor and glued his pipe rack (a present from Vera two birthdays ago) to the bulkhead. It was a novelty to be using glue at all: in George’s experience, things always had to be readily movable. The safest way to live was to assume that your marching orders would arrive tomorrow. If they didn’t, that was your good luck; and you certainly didn’t tempt fate by sticking things to your walls with glue. Pleased by the way the pipe rack looked, George hesitated over a particular treasure — a framed watercolour sketch by Van Guylen of ships at anchor in Mindelo harbour in 1846—and stuck that fast, too.

He had never had a proper place of his own before. He’d always been a lodger in other people’s houses and had picked up the lodger’s habit of passing through without leaving tracks. He’d been born in a rectory that belonged to the Church and gone on to Navy quarters and Company apartments; and he left each billet exactly as he’d found it. There was no wallpaper so virulent that George couldn’t live with it: in Dar-es-Salaam he’d slept for two years in a bedroom decorated with black feet on a forsythia-yellow ground, though it had once caused a girl called Dorothy to wake him with a screaming nightmare. In Bom Porto, the sheets on his bed were marked “Shepherd’s Hotel, Cairo”, the knives and forks belonged to the French railways, the threadbare grey towels in the bathroom to St Joseph’s Mission School. George felt no more responsible for these things than he did for the weather.

Calliope was different. Last week, when he’d received from Harwich the cracked and elderly document that registered her as a British Ship, with George as her Master and sole owner of all her 64 shares, he found that she’d been built in 1924, the same year as him. That seemed to fit nicely — it confirmed the odd kinship he’d felt with the boat when he’d first seen her drifting out from the quay. She had been a trawler then, called Lizzie V. She had been rechristened a muse in 1958, when she’d retired and been converted to a yacht. The panelled saloon had been her fish hold; and where she’d once been stacked with crans of herring, George now snugged down his shelf of Kipling. The swastikas on the spines of their claret bindings had shed most of their gold leaf: Life’s Handicap was on its last legs, Kim’s pages had grown fat and soggy with rereading. He roped the books tight with shock-cord, then made them rock solid by wedging Palgrave’s Golden Treasury between Many Inventions and Barrack Room Ballads.

It was a bit late in the day to start building one’s first real nest. In Bom Porto, George had watched other men come out in their twenties and go home to mortgages in England in their thirties, their migratory patterns as regular as those of swallows. To begin with, there had been a little British community of young men in Montedor. Until 1964, there’d been a consulate. By the ’70s, though, there was hardly anyone left. Carmody went in ’71; Palmer and Lytton in ’75. Humphreys stayed on through Independence until 1979. Then there was just George. It was as if he lacked the internal compass, or radar, or whatever it was that told birds to take off for home at the right season. He lodged where he was, waiting for orders that had taken a quarter of a century to arrive. Every year, the young men grew a shade younger. They stopped calling him “George” and started calling him “Mr Grey”. They showed him photographs of the houses they were going to buy at home — they were all of the same house, an ugly, half-prefabricated building made out of formica and eggboxes, on a “private estate” in a suburb of a Midland city. He knew the names of the girls they were planning to marry — the Alisons, Sues and Janices, with their jobs as nurses and secretaries. “Funny-you not marrying,” they said. “Oh,” George said, “I was married once,” and left it at that. When he saw the young men off, first on the boat, later at the new airport, he felt a melancholy wriggle of envy for them. They were so sure of what they wanted, and of what they deserved; and they had the mysterious knack of seeming to want only what they deserved; where he came unstuck was that he hadn’t deserved the things he wanted. Like Angela, he thought, shaking out an old brown jacket of Donegal tweed and fitting it into the port-side hanging locker.

He wound up the small barograph which used to stand in his office at the bunkering station and glued its wooden base to the shelf. A length of shock-cord, fastened to the wall with screw-eyes, made a good waistband in which to hold the battered olive oil tin full of blunt coloured pencils. There was no room at sea for clutter and loose ends. Everything had to be strapped in its due place and battened down, if you didn’t want the first big wave to turn your life into an Irish stew. George had had enough already in the way of breakages: aboard Calliope, he meant to keep things shipshape and Bristol fashion.

A scallop boat manoeuvered alongside. Its girdle of motor tyres squeezed close. Calliope slopped heavily about in its wash as the boat went astern, its screw making the water round it boil. There were voices, booted footsteps over George’s head, the sound of a heavy rope being dragged across his roof to the quay.

Hunkered down in secret, he lit the charcoal stove and paraffin lamps, and watched the saloon fill with dodging shadows, as abrupt and quick as mice. Nothing was still. The timbers of the boat flexed and creaked. The lamps tipped in their gimbals. The floor felt spongy and provisional, as if it might dissolve away from under his feet. The sensation of floating was unnervingly keen and intimate: it was like the childhood dreams in which George had stepped off a top stair and found himself weightless as an angel. Drifting gently down the deep stairwell, occasionally reaching out a toe to touch ground, he’d known that his power was unique. No-one else must learn that he could fly. It seemed that his dreams hadn’t changed much over the last five decades; they had just grown more grandiose. Now he was planning to step off the edge of England and float free.

The barograph ticked on the shelf. A brick of charcoal hissed and settled in the stove. The air was rich, laden with the good smells of wax, oil, tobacco and old wood. Moving carefully, taking pleasure in each sensation as it came, George stooped under the beams to read the barograph. The inked line on the drum was at 1023 millibars and rising steadily. Soon the wind would die and the sky clear. He stretched himself on the plum-coloured leather of the settee berth and watched the sauntering lamplights. As the boat stirred in the water, the lights crossed and tangled. They chased each other along a row of books, rested for a moment on a framed photo of Vera at the beach, and dived to the rough and vivid weave of the rug on the floor.

George closed his eyes. From across the water he could hear the jerky chatter of an outboard motor. Shouting boys were pulling the tuna boats in out of the surf. Women were carrying away armfuls of tarnished silver skipjack, and yellow dogs were barking hopefully on the fringe of things. George’s mouth sagged open. There was something he’d forgotten to tell Raymond Luis, but he couldn’t remember what it was … something about the discharge gauge on Number 2 Dock … He grunted loudly three times, and began to snore. Waking, an hour later, to the sway of the boat and the gobbling noise of water in the bilges, he opened one cautious eye on the lamplit saloon, and saw that it was all right — he was home.