Foreign Land (37 page)

George got out Tom’s sextant and fitted its brass telescope into the frame. Standing in the cockpit, he found the sun, reflected through a screen of smoked glass. Slowly turning the
knurled screw on the arc of the sextant, he removed the sun from the sky and lowered it in a series of jerks until it rested like a warty fruit on the horizon. He’d always enjoyed this clever little operation. It was satisfying to be able to mess about so casually with the solar system: you could put the sun wherever you wanted it and rearrange the planets as if they were chessmen on a board. He read off the angle between himself and the sun from the vernier: 41° 27’. He timed his sight at 0937. And fifteen seconds.

Working from the almanac at the chart table now, he found the sun’s Greenwich Hour Angle and its declination. 267° 48’ and 1° 33’. South. That would put it somewhere over Mogadishu, George reckoned. He’d been to Mogadishu once. Bloody awful place. Next he gave himself an assumed position.

“And that’s another of the navigator’s funny quirks of character,” Commander Prynne said. “In order for this trick to come out, he always has to assume that he’s somewhere where he knows he isn’t.”

George assumed that he was in Plymouth. On
Larkspur
. That made a nice round figure AP. Scribbling sums on the corner of the Admiralty chart, he calculated his intercept. 23.5 miles Away. He ruled the line in and measured off the miles. It looked as if he was within a few cables of his Dead Reckoning position. In a little while he should be able to see the Eddystone.

“Georgie?”

Angela was in his room. In her nightie.

“What about … ?”

“It’s all right. Their room’s miles away.”

He realized that he was still holding his toothbrush. He put it carefully down above the sink and wondered where on earth he’d put his dressing gown.

“Don’t I even get a goodnight kiss, then?”

And the two of them were tangled on George’s narrow bed, busy, gasping, all fingers and mouths. Angela’s nightdress was rucked up over her waist; George’s pyjama bottoms had come
untied. For about forty-five seconds (less, if one was going to be really truthful), it was like being caught up and winnowed in a paradisal threshing machine. George was harvested first; it took Angela a few moments longer before she too came clear of the sucking and clinging and tumbling.

“Oh God!” George said, “God … God … God!”

They lay together in the sexy, fishy smell of themselves. George couldn’t believe himself. He felt as if he’d been decorated—that there should be letters after his name now.
He’d got to Number Ten
. Well, perhaps not quite Number Ten in the usual sense; but surely what he and Angela had just done counted for pretty much the same thing … didn’t it? Then, in his pride, he remembered that he and Angela were Deeply in Love and he felt shabby and callow for ever allowing himself to think like that. You nerk.

“Darling!”

“Sweetie …” She was actually holding his damp penis in her hand.

“You couldn’t get … have a baby like … that … could you?”

Angela giggled. “Georgie! Do you want me to tell you about the birds and the bees?”

It was her tone of voice that made him say, “Have you ever … done it?”

No answer. George said: “I wouldn’t mind. If you had … darling.”

She was suddenly sitting upright, holding a blanket up over her chest. Her eyes were fierce and appalled. “What a horrible, horrible, horrible thing to say!”

“Oh Christ, Angela, I’m sorry, all I meant was—”

“It’s too vile for words. It’s
filthy
. How
could
you? It’s because you’re a beast, isn’t it? It’s because you’ve done it with horrible prostitutes. In the
docks
. I don’t want to hear about it, George. Your
women
. The beastly things you do. You’ve got a disease! You’re
infected!
You’ve got VD!”

George wept. He said sorry a hundred times. He hated himself. He loved Angela. He told her that he was more
ashamed of himself now than he’d ever been in his entire life. He tried to hold her, to comfort her for the dreadful thing he’d said, but it was a good ten minutes before Angela frostily began to allow herself to be mollified.

“Oh, George, it’s too awful,” she said happily. “I don’t know whether I shall ever be able to trust you again.”

It was another five minutes before George heard her giggle.

“What? Darling?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking.” She raised herself on one elbow and looked down on him. “Georgie? Do you think I’d look funny, wearing black?”

“Grunff!” George said, putting a circle round the cross of his position. He was just as ashamed of himself here as he was there, and hardly less baffled by Angela’s lightning manoeuvres. Christ, but she had him on the run now! He was skipping about for her like a miniature dachshund doing tricks for biscuits.

The Eddystone Lighthouse was showing now as a hairline crack on the horizon far away to the southeast. George took its bearing. 124°. Just right. He stepped out on to the foredeck and winched up the big tan mainsail, watching the wind uncrease it as it climbed the mast. He raised the jib, flapping and banging overhead, and walked back to the cockpit to tighten the sheet. His father was there—seated on the gas locker wearing his summer alpaca jacket and straw boater.

Fuddle-headed, George did his best to concentrate on hauling the jib in against the wind and wrapping the end of the rope around the wooden cleat. When he turned round, though, his father was still there, staring at the sea with much the same sort of suspicious disdain that he might have shown to a rally of Primitive Methodists. His lips were pursed, his eyes narrowed against the sun.

“You look cold,” George said. The rector’s dress was hopelessly wrong for a mid-March morning out at sea. “Shouldn’t you be wearing something warmer?”

His father shook his head distractedly. When he turned his face to George, it moved stiffly, like a tortoise’s, above the
wattles of his neck.

“Mightn’t it be a good idea to wait for a while, old boy? And see how you both feel about it in six months’ time? Don’t you think?”

Calliope
leaned to starboard in a long gust. The rector, arms spread along the gunwale, opened his mouth and let out a small bubble of fright. He’d never been good on boats. Crossing the Irish Sea, in a flat calm, from Liverpool to the Isle of Man in ’39, he spent the entire passage sitting rigid in a corner of the saloon holding
The Times
upside down in front of his face.

He said: “Of course, Angela does seem a frightfully nice girl.” Then, “What do you say, old boy—about giving it six months?”

Nice? Nice? How dare his father call Angela nice! George said: “We’re not waiting. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, Daddy, but there happens to be a war on. Chaps are getting killed, you know.”

His father gazed at the Eddystone, the one stable point in a gently rolling world. He looked as if he wanted to put his arms around the lighthouse and cling to it for dear life.

“Yes,” he said; “there’s that, of course. Though it’s an argument that could cut two ways, old boy.”

“There’s no ‘argument’ about it,” George said. “It’s fixed, Daddy.”

The rector’s hands fluttered on the gunwale. His unhappy eyes were hunting for his son. For a sickmaking moment, George saw that his father was actually a few years younger than he was himself. Poor bloody sod. He was muffing it so badly, too. George wanted to shake some life into him—if only he could make a present to his father of the words that the rector couldn’t find, perhaps …

“You’re only nineteen—”

Oh, damn you, Daddy, for that stupid, frightened, bald, uncalculating move!

“I’m old enough to be an officer! I’m old enough to fight this fucking war!”

“George!”

“All right, then, lovely war! Nice war! Pretty little war! Whatever you want! But just wake up, will you, to the fact that I’m a man and this is my life and I am running it, and if you don’t like it you can lump it!”

The words tasted leaden and stale in his own mouth. It was George, after all, and not the rector, who needed a fresh script. He felt lumbered, condemned to rehearse this old degrading patter of every son to every father. Poor father, poor son, trapped in the same leaky boat.

Pat on cue, his father said: “The last thing that either your mother or I want, old boy, is for you to be unhappy—”

“Then you won’t try and stop Angela and me from getting married—”

“No, George, I shan’t do that.”

The rector looked away at the curling wash behind the boat; the wind tugged the black half moon of his clerical stock clear of his pullover and made his thin jacket balloon round his chest. What a pair of scarecrows they must look, George thought: two old buffers, peevishly wrangling out of sight of land, one in a boater, one in a baseball cap … you’d have to laugh. But he couldn’t bear the thought of what was coming next.

His father reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and held out a sealed envelope to George.

“Every happiness, old boy,” he mumbled. Then he said it again, too loudly, “Every happiness.”

So his father had known all along that he’d lose. The envelope was addressed “For George and Angela, with love from Deny’s and Mary.” There was something uncomfortable in seeing his parents’ Christian names like that; they looked nude.

“Thanks awfully,” George said.

“You’d better open it, old boy. Save the suspense …” His father pretended to transfer all his attention to a tickle behind his ear, but the boat rolled again and he had to clutch at the toerail, his legs stiffly splayed, the wide turn-ups of his shiny
trousers flapping.

Inside the envelope, a cheque for seventy-five guineas. For George’s father, it was a fortune, a king’s ransom. Seventy-five guineas, from the rector, whose favourite word was “rectitude”! To write a cheque like that, he must have lain awake at nights, conducting an auction with himself and watching the price of marriage steepen, from twenty to twenty-five, past thirty, and rocket through the ceiling of fifty. It was no wonder that the writing on the cheque didn’t look like his father’s hand at all but had an artificial copperplate precision, as if every letter had taken several seconds to inscribe. It was a cheque to make one doubt one’s eyesight, a cheque to frame and publish, a cheque perhaps designed to announce that the Greys were perfectly well able to hold up their heads with the Haighs of the world.

This, though, wasn’t what struck George about the cheque when he first saw it. His first thought was that he’d better tell Angela that it was for a hundred; seventy-five was so shabbily, transparently middle class. Seventy-five, in fact (and he hated that five), was Just about Typical. The other thing about the cheque was that it came from Lloyds Bank. Angela’s family all banked at Coutts, and George was planning to transfer his account there too. The trouble with Lloyds’ cheques was that they gave one away so, like cheap shirts.

“Thanks awfully, Daddy,” he said, a little less enthusiastically than when he’d taken the unopened envelope. “I know it’ll … come in jolly useful.”

His father watched the cheque disappear into George’s pocket as if he was following a conjuring trick in which turtle doves were going to sprout from George’s cuffs any moment now. He laughed—a dry, embarrassed little titter. “I thought you’d prefer money, old boy—when Mummy and I got married, all we seemed to get from people was bone china and sheets.”

George said: “Mr Haigh says he thinks he can rustle up an unused ’39 MG. Apparently the company owes him a favour.”

Suddenly sag-shouldered, the rector stared blankly out to
sea. A broken fish crate floated past with two gulls standing on it face to face like a pair of bookends. The rector’s voice when it came back to George was thin and distant, filtered by the breeze.

“A motor car, George? Where do you think you’re going to get the petrol from to run a thing like that?”

George ducked his head inside the wheelhouse to check the compass course; stepping back, he found he had the cockpit to himself. With the engine switched off, there was only the slop and gurgle of his freshwater supply in its fifty-gallon tank, the irregular ticking of the autopilot and the creak of the planking on the frames as the hull flexed to fit the sea. He went below to put a kettle on the stove for coffee.

Down in the saloon, it was like being in an echo chamber full of noises. There were whispers, the rustle of dresses in a room, the sound of doors being opened and closed, a woman sobbing, a man’s distant laughter. No wonder people heard and saw such odd things when they sailed alone: listening to
Calliope
as she lolloped through the waves was a bit like putting one’s ear to a crack in the wall when one’s neighbours were throwing a party. It was lonely and cosy all at once.

He carried his mug of coffee back up to the wheelhouse and studied the horizon. About two miles off on the bow there were three ships steaming north in line, on course for Plymouth Sound. Warships, from the look of them. George focused his binoculars on them. Yes, that was the Navy: two destroyers and a frigate, out on manoeuvres. The frigate quivered unsteadily in the lenses as George took in its angular sharkishness, its immaculate paintwork of armoured grey. It was his colour—the colour of rain clouds, cinders, schoolboy trousers. As it headed closer, he could pick out its twin radar scanners rotating slowly on their stalks, and its big guns wrapped like parcels in tarpaulins.

He switched on the VHS to see if the warships were talking, and found the radio full of voices that made him start because they sounded so like his own. Younger, of course, and lighter in pitch; but George heard them as
his
voice. OK,
Halifax
,
roger and out. He found himself repeating the words out loud as he watched the ships pass less than a mile to port. He followed them with the binoculars until they melted into the sky. Well, he’d had his chance to be on that course once. He’d be retired now anyway; and the chances were that he’d never have got beyond Commander; and he’d probably have found one of those girl scout service wives that Mr Haigh meant when he said “adequate”. He put the binoculars down and sipped his bitter instant coffee.