Foreign Land

by Jonathan Raban

  “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 c
rew 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. Sh
e 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.