It had definite possibilities. You could do a lot with the sea … Just when they were making the old bloke come, you’d cut to crashing waves and foam and that. It’d be artistic. Like if the fat girl, Skipper, went down on an old bloke, you could have a big wave crashing down over the front of the boat. Then there were all those ropes. They’d come in handy. The three of them could tie up the old bloke and flog him in the sun.
Nice. The trouble with most videos was they looked plain sordid. This one would be different. Healthy, open air stuff, with plenty of sea spray and sunsets. T. Jellaby had started on a video last year—a modest effort with Tracey Pengelly and the Blazeby kid from the estate in a big foam bath—but he’d run into problems with the lighting of it. The lighting on this one would be a dead cinch.
Of course, you’d have to lens it in the summer and make out that it was in the Caribbean or the Med. The beach at Par could double for the Cote D’Azur on a sunny day. You’d just need some French signs around the place. And the girls would have to look brown … there was one in St Austell, half Indian, who was exactly the right colour. According to Mick Walsh, she was the town bike. “Skipper” would take more thinking about. Fat, definitely, but not blowsy. T. Jellaby saw a great smooth bum and the sort of cleavage that made you want to drop ice lollies in there. But tasteful. Like something carved in marble.
The really hard ones to find would be the old blokes themselves. It was obvious how they should look—straw boaters, blazers, canes, cricket trousers (would spats be a bit over the top? You could have some fun with spats) and crocodile-skin shoes. The tricky part would be to get the right kind of bloke to say yes. Maybe you shouldn’t tell them what you had in mind until it was too late—then the story in the video would be for real. T. Jellaby had to laugh when he saw the crazed old buggers being taken apart by Skipper and her crew, starkers except for their bright red espadrilles, with the boat rolling about somewhere off Dodman Point.
As he locked up the shop, he was daydreaming in titles. “Pussy Ahoy” … a bit crude, that. It needed something more innocent and frolicky. “Saucy Sailors” was closer to it. “Wet Dreams” was good, but too subtle. He rather liked the sound of “The Good Ship Naughty”. To be going on with, anyway. As for the boat, that Calliope would be just the job. But Captain Birdseye was a standoffish old fart, and T. Jellaby had his doubts as to whether he’d come in, in return for a slice of the action.
Harmony Cottage was out at sea. Diana felt the floor roll away under her feet and steadied herself by leaning on a joist as her kitchen tilted and yawed. She was landsick. She loaded a tray with Alka Seltzer, mineral water, a glass of hot milk and a thriller by Dick Francis that she thought she hadn’t read before, and carried it gingerly up to the bedroom. What did they call the stairs on ships? Companionways. Companion-less, she scaled her steep, uncarpeted companionway.
The wind blew all night and the rain came in sharp squalls, making the lagoon outside her window sound as if it was coming up to the boil. She had read the Dick Francis before. Her dreams were scrambled: there were jellyfish in them, foreign voices, creaming waves, a car chase along an aerial expressway in which her mother was driving and Diana lay in the back seat in a foetal crouch. She woke abruptly with a frown on her face, with the early birds.
She breakfasted on yoghurt and cigarettes, stubbing out the butts in the emptied carton. When the radio woke up too, she listened to a man reciting wheat and fatstock prices. Then the weather forecast for shipping came on. For the first time ever, she paid attention to the metrical litany of the sea areas. Dogger, Fisher, German Bight … Sole, Lundy, Fastnet … Shannon, Bailey, Malin, Rockall … She didn’t know where any of them were, but there was wild weather in them all: gales, severe gales, storms force ten. She found these warnings exciting. They translated for her into seas as torn and racing as the bilious sky overhead, with matchwood arks being hurled from crest to crest. When the man went on to read the proper news, about picket lines, abducted children and foreign wars, it sounded irrelevant and remote. When he said the word “summit”, she saw it as the frothy peak of an enormous tumbling wave.
At 8.30, gumbooted against the wet, she pushed open the kitchen door and had to lean on the wind to get out of the house. The garden was a drenched and sullen tangle; the stream had turned overnight into a full-blown river, the colour of weak cocoa. It had broken loose from Diana’s artful conduit and was pouring straight down the side of the hill. Close to the beach, with its rim of dirty scud, it fanned out over a delta of grey shale. Diana paddled across it to the car. She got halfway up the track before the rear wheels started to spin in the soft mud and the bonnet went hunting right and left as the car put down its roots and refused to budge.
It was raining again. She ran down the hill, slipping and sliding, with the wind blowing her skirt up into her face and the rain stinging her wrists. When she reached the kitchen door she was laughing out loud, high on the gale and on her night of damaged sleep. Looking back, she saw she’d left the car door open. The wind was catching it and the stranded car, like a shiny black slug, looked as if it was feebly signalling for help.
Why had she tried to drive to the village in the first place? She couldn’t remember. She felt stupid, soaked and happy. Something had happened; exactly what she couldn’t place, but it was to do with the sea, and it was as if all the separate bits of the world had been shaken and rearranged while she’d clung to the rope strap in the wheelhouse and the combers had come bulging up behind. Diana felt lighter, somehow more possible, than she’d done for an age. The only pity, she thought, surprising herself, was that George wasn’t around. It would have been nice to come upon him at the wheel in the sitting room, piloting the cottage through the turbulent morning; this navigator who always knew where he was, her new foulweather friend.
Foulweather Friend. It was a title. It would certainly work as a refrain. It had been a million years since Diana had found words fitting themselves to musical phrases in her head. Raking the wood ash out of the grate, feeling pleasantly silly, she experimented with foulweather friend. When she’d been in the business, her voice was a choirboy treble; it had sunk to contralto in real life, but the voice inside her skull was still fine and high. Melody Maker always used to call it “famished”, but Diana thought of it as just prettily slim. She lit the Calor Gas poker under a fresh pile of damp logs.
In Biscay and the German Bight,
Malin, Hebrides and Wight,
I’m counting on you.
(Can I count on you,
My foulweather friend?)
She conjured a lot of oom-pah in the bass and fluting, Severe Gale sounds from the woodwind section. Pine smoke ballooned from the fire.
Nutzo. Still, that was one of the consolations of living alone; there was no-one to catch you out being childish. Or hackneyed.
I’m feeling blue.
(Don’t know about you,
My foulweather friend.)
Then the telephone rang. Apparently George had caught her out. She put on her gruff gardening voice to cover her tracks. But it wasn’t George; it was Verity Caine.
“One teeny favour, darling, if you’ve got a moment …” Verity Caine tinkled on like a stuck shop bell; Diana drew a small boat on the Truro telephone directory.
You had to go through the operator to reach Montedor. Even Guinea-Bissau was on the direct dialling system now, but the antique Portuguese telephone equipment of Bom Porto was beyond the reach of modern communications technology. Vera’s phone had a handle on it that you had to wind round and round when you made outgoing calls, and George was afraid that an incoming one from England might throw the instrument into a fit of hysteria. Nevertheless, he rang the international operator and gave him Vera’s number. There was an unpromising silence on the other end.
“It’s in Africa,” George said.
“Modena, Monarco, Montana, Monte Cristo, Montego Bay, Montenegro, two Montereys and four, no five, Montezumas. Sorry. I’ve got you. Montedor.”
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“That’s the one.”
“One minute, caller,” the operator said, with unwise optimism, George thought. Ten minutes later, after a wide variety of clicks, dialling tones and voices on crossed lines, the operator said, “Lousy weather. What’s it like down there, caller?”
“Very windy,” George said.
“And that doesn’t help.” There was the sound of a ringing bell somewhere half-way across the world. “We were going down to Weston-super-Mare this weekend. Looks as if that trip is going to be rained off.”
“Oh, what a shame.” It didn’t sound at all like Vera’s bell.
“I’m going to try re-routing you now.”
“Yes, do that.”
“There’s nothing worse, is there? A wet weekend with kids on your hands and the wife sick …”
“Can’t you lock them up in a cinema?” George said.
“One’s ten months, one’s twenty, and the other’s three. I’d like to see the Gaumont after they’d been through it. They’d beat the Blitz. Oh, hello, Senegal! Is that Senegal? This is Bristol, Youkay. We’re trying to reach a number in Montedor. That’s Mike Oscar November Tango Echo Delta Oscar Romeo. Mon-tee-dor.”
“Monte-dor,” George interrupted for Senegal’s benefit.
There were more clicks, followed by a noise like a brush fire. Then a clear voice came through, American in accent but African in its glottal warmth and depth. “We have congestion on all lines to Montedor. You try one other day, Bristol-Youkay.”
“Thank you, Senegal. Did you follow that, caller? Congestion. Like my wife’s trouble.”
“Well,” George said, “thanks for trying, anyway.”
On the quay, T. Jellaby was sitting in the passenger seat of his van. He was eating cheese and pickle sandwiches for lunch and studying the boats as they bumped and rolled on their moorings. He had, as he found it necessary to admit to himself, a pretty fertile imagination—well, more fertile than most, anyway—but those boats … you only had to look at them for ideas to come faster than you could handle them. He stared at the cross-trees on their masts. That was obvious, of course. But there were things you could do with winches, for instance, that would boggle your mind. He bit deep into his last sandwich. That was something else he must remember to tell Mum: lately she’d been going a bit too easy on the cayenne pepper.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Stretched barefoot on the starboard hand settee, George dozed and read and dozed again. Briquettes of charcoal whispered in the brassbound stove on the bulkhead; the fenders belched and sighed as the gale shunted the boats around against the quay. Away from the ancestors, away from the bureau drawers full of his father’s papers and from the faint, mothball smell of his mother’s widowed life, George was happily far out at sea. Captains kept him company: he dipped into Captain Slocum, he followed Captain Cook into the Pacific, he listened to the wind in his own rigging as Captain McWhirr drove stolidly for the eye of the typhoon. He re-read The Riddle of the Sands for the first time since he was thirteen. Galebound himself, all George required of a book was that it had the sea in it, and he read these voyages as impatiently as if they were thrillers. They piled up in the saloon, their pages splayed on the teak floor. When George slept in the boat he was a crucial eighteen inches—a whole world—away from Cornwall; when he dreamed, as he did almost continuously, the horizon was always empty and enormous.
It wasn’t the first time that he’d run away to sea. George was an old hand at this game. In May of ’43, when he’d been sitting his exams for School Cert, he had prayed for the war to go on long enough for him to get into the Navy. He grew more anxious at each new advance of the Allies. There was another, undeclared war on then, between Mr Churchill and G. P. N. Grey’s first gold stripe. It was a close-run thing between George and Admiral Doenitz as to who was keenest to keep the U-Boat fleet on station in the Atlantic. All George wanted was the view from the bridge of some dumpy little corvette on convoy duty, with the sea high and the sound of the engines broken by the monotonous pinging of the Asdic. He didn’t want to kill anyone—he hated the messing about with—303 rifles and Bren guns that went on every Saturday morning in the school O.T.C.. He just ached to take ship.
His father, of course, wanted George to go into the Army. Denys Ferguson Grey had spent the Great War as a chaplain in Poperinghe, and he still enjoyed being called “Padre” by his more military parishioners. He had never learned to swim; though rather a fat man, he had the kind of weighty bulk that looked as if it was designed to sink. You only had to see him in a bathing suit to imagine him going straight down in a stream of bubbles. Whenever George thought of the sea, it seemed to him a kindly place mainly because he imagined himself floating away on it leaving his unbuoyant father stranded on the beach.
On summer holidays, first in Dawlish, then in Ilfracombe, Mr Grey led his family to this dangerous element like Moses going at the head of the Israelites on their passage through the wilderness. In his old school boater and black and burgundy striped swimming costume, he made strangers look up from their deck chairs and snigger. He always carried an upended prawn net like an episcopal staff. George’s mother walked six paces behind him with the picnic hamper (an aeon later, in Aden, George realized that his mother was a model Arab wife); George himself skulked twenty, thirty, forty yards behind, and did his best to announce to the world that he was in no way related to the odd couple ahead. Hands deep in the pockets of his long short trousers, he put on his Edward G. Robinson scowl, kicked moodily at the sand and kept his eyes on the horizon, where colliers and cruise liners left their smoky prints upon the sky.
“Oh, do buck up, old boy, for heaven’s sake! Stop loitering!” his father shouted, and George, aged eleven, would slowly turn his head and peer behind him, searching the beach for the truant child of the fat man in the straw hat.
Mr Grey had no more liking for the sea than he had for charabancs, garlic or flappers. He found it disorderly and vulgar. But year after year he visited it—in much the same spirit as he visited the sick; a regrettable duty whose chief merit was that it chastened the soul. When he retired to the seaside, and not just to the seaside but to a house called Thalassa no less, he must, George thought, have been carrying his holiday principle to its logical, dutiful conclusion.
Now he remembered his father bending shortsightedly over a rockpool. Mr Grey was parting the oarweed with the cane of the prawn net. “Blenny,” he said. Then, “Starfish”. Then, “Anemone”. It was as if by naming each sea animal he could rob it of further interest. When the oarweed closed back on the pool, it was like the curtain coming down at the end of a play; the story was over, it was time to go home.
On the cliff path back to the hotel, his father took the same melancholy pleasure in pointing out the fossils embedded in the soft grey limestone. Every few yards he would tap the rock with the prawn net and say “Hmm? Hmm? What do you make of that?”
“Ammonite,” George said, and the tribe of three was allowed to move on a little further up the cliff. The handle of the net rattled on the rock again. “Trilobites,” George said; but his father had found the flaky remains of yet another prehistoric something.
“Old bullets,” George said and giggled, hoping to make his mother giggle too. “Oliver Cromwell’s toenails.”
“Lipsticks!” his mother said, and laughed at herself for daring to say such a thing.
“Belemnite guards, old boy, belemnite guards.” His father gave a weary sniff. There was so much silliness around in the world today; was there, the sniff asked, any need to add to it?
Seven years later, George got away to sea. At least, he had got as far as the requisitioned Butlin’s holiday camp at Pwllheli, where he apprenticed himself to Commander Prynne and had already got drunk, twice. He was both on the run from his father and trying to beat his father at his father’s own game. All through his childhood he’d been licked hollow by his father—at fossils, at names of the English Kings and Queens, at Greek mythology and the county cric
ket scores. (Denys Grey was solid for Worcestershire, so George, who hated cricket, was credited with a passionate loyalty to the fortunes of Surrey, the one county for which his father expressed complete contempt and which he always referred to as “Surburbery”.) After each tea-table defeat, his father would put on his most polite and inquiring voice to ask: “I do sometimes wonder, old boy, if they teach you anything at all, nowadays, at public school?”
Well, George was learning a thing or two at Pwllheli. His father could bloody well keep Harold Larwood and the belemnite guards; for George now had cocked hats, starsights, distances-off, bowlines and tidal streams. On his first weekend leave he came back to the Rectory with his new sextant, Tyrrell’s Principles of Marine Navigation and Volume 3 of the Admiralty Sight Reduction Tables.
On Saturday morning George set out his books conspicuously on the dining table. His father watched him from over the top of The Times. “Swotting?” He let out a little whistle of disdain. If you had to swot on a Saturday, you must be a pretty dim bunny, by his father’s lights.
“We’ve got a Nav. test next week.”
“I suppose it’s all done by numbers nowadays, is it? Maths was never my strong point.” His father went back to his paper.
“You have to get into the top five to make the Nav. Officers’ course. Otherwise it’ll just be Deck for me.”
“The Whitaker boy … what’sisname?”
“Nick?”
“Yes. He’s doing awfully well. In North Africa, now. With Monty. His father says he’s up for his third pip.”
At Matins on Sunday, George’s father preached on a text from Ephesians. “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called.” George sat with his mother in the seventh pew from the front.
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