Foreign Land (42 page)

The tide had turned against him. The water in the English Channel was drifting westwards now, back to the Atlantic. For the most part, it was moving sluggishly at a knot or so; but where Start Point stuck out into the stream like a crooked forefinger, the tide raced past the land, as fast as a river in flood. Even with the engine on,
Calliope
was making hardly any headway over the ground. The lighthouse, standing on its own island of black shadowed rock, remained firmly stuck a mile off on the port bow, though the sea swept by in a wash of foam, and the boat’s wake trailed behind her in a broad V of curling water. It was bloody strange—as if reality had torn in half, and the two sides of the picture refused to match. When he looked at the sea, he was creaming along at top speed. But when he looked across at the land, he was as fixed as a navigation buoy, tethered to the seafloor on a chain and bucking fretfully on the tide. Sometimes the sea won, sometimes the land, and every time George looked, he knew that what his eyes told him was untrue.

He couldn’t rid his mouth of the carbony, acidic taste of the champagne.

Peter Moffatt said, “Well, here’s to Angie and Sheila—and George, of course”, and the baby in Angela’s arms began to cry, like a single, thin, monotonous note on the top of the scale on a harmonica. The sound deepened and grew louder, the wizened face filled out and turned into George’s own baby, up on the bridge aboard
Hecla
.

“She wants her milk … doesn’t she?” George said.

In full view of the bachelors, Angela exposed her nipple with its mysterious circlet of fair hair. The baby sucked, as sure of itself as a sea anemone fastening on an extended fingertip. The bachelors, silent in the presence of a sacrament, studied the turning fan over the bed. George watched. His eyes pricked with love and pride and hope. It was the only time that Angela ever let him see her suckling their baby; and Sheila was weaned at fourteen days.

It took an hour to round the lighthouse, with the wind dying away and the cliffs casting a widening pool of cold shadow over the sea.
Calliope
, straining against the surge of tide, inched past, her sails slatting uselessly, her engine drumming under George’s feet. Hunting for slack water close inshore, he steered the boat frighteningly near to the rocks. There was no slack water. The sea raced past the drying ledges, looking as smooth and thick as black treacle.

Beyond the lighthouse, the horizon was oddly lumpy and there were breakers ahead. Scared of running aground on a shoal, George checked with the chart and saw immediately what the trouble was. The tide, sweeping south and east, rode slap bang over a shallow hill of sand, where it crumpled and broke up. He tried to skirt the tangled water of the race, but was caught in the edge of it.
Calliope
was shoved and jostled by houndstooth waves that sprang up out of nowhere. Zigzags of foamy water, like the tracks of giant fish, charged at the boat. The steering went slack as she skidded on the lip of a yawning eddy. Down below, something heavy was sliding across the floor of the saloon. A wave like a waterspout threw
Calliope
on her side for a second, and George feared for the rigging as the boom of the slack mainsail crashed into the shrouds.

“And hands that do dishes …” Wedged in tight, he hung on to the wheel and saw the sky slide up from under his feet. The propeller screeched as a rogue wave lifted it clear of the water and made it grind on air. The wheelhouse windows streamed.

“Will be soft as your face …” Yawing and slamming her way through the last of the rough stuff, the boat carried him into the frozen calm of Start Bay, where he found that he was still bellowing that damned jingle out loud and the blood was foaming in his veins like the sea.

He went out on deck to get the sails down. Between the boat and the shore, the twilit water had the metallic iridescence of a pool of mercury. It was joined to Devonshire by a fine seam of wet sand. At the edge of the sea, the land was a long low strip of grassy dunes and straggling villages: from half a mile off it was as remote as a little world inside a blown glass paperweight. At Hall Sands there were anglers under green umbrellas; at Tor Cross, a matchstick man was throwing driftwood for his capering dog. One after another, lights came on in bungalows and squat mock Tudor villas: George, bundling the cold canvas in his arms, watched. It was the time for tea and sponge cakes and the electric-coloured yatter of children’s TV. The tips of his fingers were white and numb as he lashed the sail to the boom. He liked the feeling of being out at sea in the dark, unnoticed, looking in. When he went back to the wheelhouse he was smiling in his beard, as if the villages were a pretty invention that he’d just made up.

There was no making out the daymark above the entrance to the River Dart. He motored cautiously north through the still water towards a mountainous wall of matt black. A Naval College launch full of cadets cut across his bows. Then he was overtaken by a returning crabber, her stern deck blindingly floodlit, seagulls jostling in her wake like bats. George could hear the sea sucking on rocks worryingly close at hand.

Shielding his eyes from the lights of the trawler, he searched the darkness over on the port side and found the lazy red flash of Kingswear Main Light inside the estuary. He kept on course and waited for the red flash to turn to white. Red. Red. Red. Red. Red.
Calliope
seemed to be right under the cliff ahead before the white sector showed and he swung the boat to home in on the beam. The wooded land closed round him like fur. He squeezed between the turretted silhouettes of a pair of storybook castles, and there was Dartmouth—a carnival of lights on the water, a good party to gatecrash.

Even so, he was choosy about the company he kept. He left the regimented alloy forest of a yacht marina well to starboard, not wanting the magic of the evening to be spoiled by a lot of bloody yachtsmen. He dodged a ferry, slipped under the stern of an antique brigantine moored in the fairway, and came up in an uncrowded reach of inky water on the Kingswear side of the river. Working by torchlight, he dropped his hook and saw the heavy anchor wink deep down like a turning fish as the chain rattled over the bow.

He lit the paraffin lamps and tidied up the wreckage in the saloon. It wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d feared: two plates were broken; Conrad, Kipling, P. G. Wodehouse and
Reed’s Nautical Almanac
were tangled up together on the floor; the transistor radio had come unstowed and its casing was cracked, but when George switched it on a woman was reading the usual news. He got the charcoal stove going, poured himself half a tumblerful of Chivas Regal and laid out food in tins. Vera watched him from her photograph on the bulkhead.

She said: “Oh, George—you eating chickenshit again?” Chickenshit was one of Teddy’s words, and George resented it.

“It’s a perfectly good steak and kidney pudding,” he said.

“Steak and kidney chickenshit. You know the cholesterol level of that thing? One of these days, George, I am telling you, you are going to be dead before your time.”

He punctured the tin with a can opener and looked back at
Vera on her rock, ample as a dugong.

“The trouble with you, George, is you just love to eat shit.” “Oh, do come off it, old love,” he said feebly, and lowered the tin carefully into a saucepan of hot water. He wasn’t up to much as a cook, but there were a few things that he could do pretty efficiently and Fray Bentos steak and kidney pudding was one of them.

With the trembling flames of the lamps, the glow of the charcoal stove and the twin gas rings burning blue in the galley, the boat was a cave of jumping shadows. He found Diana there, half hidden behind the hanging fern in its basket. She looked younger than when he’d last seen her, even more like the remembered girl on the black and white television screen, the outline of her face softened by the drifting smoke of her cigarette. He blessed her for being there—for being that kindly, floating trick of the air and the light. He brought up a half bottle of Pomerol from his cellar in the bilges, set out knife and fork and placemat on the saloon table, and dined with Diana.

It was the dining alone—more, even, than the cold palpable silence of Sheila’s room with its closed shutters—that George dreaded most. From May to September, Angela escaped to London for the hot season. Ahaza, the wall-eyed Jewish nurse from Ta’izz, was paid off for the duration and George was left to rattle in the empty house, a summer widower.

They’d moved to Crater Town, to an ancient, narrow, five-storey tower of baked mud, once the mansion of a date merchant. There were no European neighbours. Camping out by himself in the gloom and dust, George listened through a broken lattice to the babble of motor horns and shouted Arabic in the street below.

The other summer widowers were a miserable crew. They ate at the Club (toad in the hole, plum duff and warm, bottled Worthington), swapped dog-eared photos of their family houses in England, read their wives’ letters aloud to anyone
who’d listen, formed drab huddles round the dartboard, and were treated like lepers by the bachelors. George went to the Club two or three evenings a week and found it lonelier than his forlorn lodgings in Crater Town.

So he stayed at home, with a Tilley lamp hung from a nail in a beam (the house wasn’t rigged for electricity). He set himself the job of working his way through the Tauchnitz Library, bought by the boxful, sight unseen, from Mesloumian’s, the Armenian bookshop on the corner. He wrote letters. At least, he didn’t so much write them as draw them. Finding things to say to Angela was always tricky: the weather was no use as a topic since it stayed the same way for weeks on end, with the temperature in the hundreds and the humidity in the nineties, and gossip from the Club was pretty sparse at that time of year. Jerry Kingdom shot himself in July; but that was like a freak earthquake, and anyway Jerry eventually pulled through, having missed his heart by several inches and causing only a nasty wound in his shoulder.

It was the drawings for Sheila that made the bind of letter-writing worthwhile. George drew Arab ladies, like human bell tents, with drums of water on their heads; sailors in wide trousers; dogs; ships at sea; Mr Al Sabir’s new American motor car. He always drew himself in the right hand margin of these pictures—a grinning beanpole in a hat, smoke billowing from his pipe, pointing at the subject of the drawing with a forefinger as big as a banana.

In the summer, George was sick with the knowledge that it was always like this, really. Sheila and Angela were connected to him by a fraying thread. Each winter, their presence in Aden was more of an accident, and the house on Bab al Qulu felt like an empty house, graced by unreliable and exotic visitors. As Angela’s letter in September ’49 put it, “I shall be coming to stay on the 14th …”; George tortured himself with that phrase.

He knew it was his fault. It wasn’t surprising that Angela was bored by him—he was bored by himself. Other chaps were bright as buttons, with their easy way of dishing out compliments,
their knack of turning everything that happened to them into a clever joke. George felt lumpish and tongue-tied beside these men who sped prettily through the world like skaters on a rink. When the dried-up stream of dinner invitations began to flow again in October, he would see Angela at the far end of tables, laughing as she never laughed in the house, her enormous eyes alight with a rapt attention that George could never rouse.

“Yes,” George said to his neighbour at the table, a visiting agricultural boffin from the UN, “we should see a gross tonnage of at least two million by next year.” How could you be clever and funny about things like that?

He did what he could. Each year he dreamed up an adventure for his wife—something that would make her want to come back to Aden, with Sheila. It was George’s idea that she crossed the Empty Quarter with Freddie Blount, driving the second landrover. Everyone said that Freddie Blount was interested only in little brown boys, so George felt safe and Angela, on her return, kept the entire Protectorate spellbound for months with her marvellous stories of the trip. George found a berth for Angela when he heard that Toby Morgan was planning to sail a dhow from Aden to Kuwait. She camped in the mountains in Oman with Alan Pigott-Williams, and flew to Baghdad, from where she drifted down the Tigris to Basra on a raft with Freya Stark.

When Angela was away on her expeditions, George came back early from the bunkering station to the house and played with Sheila. Ahaza sat cross-legged in the corner of the room, her wall-eye roaming. Some mornings, he carried Sheila on his shoulders to his office on the quayside and saw her properly piped aboard the visiting ships.

“And an orange juice, if you have one, for Rear Admiral Grey.”

The captains made a gratifying fuss over her, and Sheila loved the ships—their spooky mazes of ladders and hatchways and secret compartments. Toddling stiffly on wide-apart legs, she made her tour of inspection, collecting treasures at each
stop: a rough-cut opal on the bridge, biscuits in the galley, a useful box from the ABs’ quarters.