Foreign Land (48 page)

In Lymington, Diana slammed the car door shut and went out to brave another dreary yacht marina. They were all the same—the same demented cowbell noise of metal rigging banging into metal masts, the same breezy good old boys in faded denims and braided captains’ hats. The marinas were uglier by far than the caravan sites. Every once-pretty river was spoiled by them. Where there had been rushbeds as thick as harvest corn, and seapink and milkwort and herb robert, there was now just pontoon on pontoon of expensive plastic toys. She must have seen millions of pounds’ worth of them already—idle, charmless things that tinkled in the wind and looked like nothing so much as dollops of fiddled income tax.

She had woken in the hotel room at Poole feeling tired, helpless, out of place. The morning sun had robbed her quest of point and shadow. Over the Nescafe and stale croissant that passed for a “continental breakfast”, it looked a poor sad thing, too naked to face without a wince of embarrassment. This chasing after George only succeeded in making Diana seem more fractured, more incomplete to herself. Better to go botanising alone for lichens, or stay up all night waiting for the liquid wink of badgers’ eyes in the grotto.

The lusts of the flesh draw us to rove abroad; but when the time is past, what earnest thou home but a burdened conscience and a distracted heart?

Yes, but the trouble was that she was haunted by the
dangerous line. Without a friend, thou canst not well live.

So she paid her bill with a mint American Express card and plugged on from marina to marina, putting the same unhopeful question at every place.

She opened the door of the blue Portakabin that served as an office. “I am looking,” she said, as she always said, “for a yacht called
Calliope.”

George had sailed through the night, cat-napping when he could. The swell left by the gale was still running, in steep black hills as cleanly contoured as desert dunes. They came racing from behind in the dark, seizing the boat in exhilarating swoops and plummetings. He found Antares on the sky, and tried to keep it in the starboard shrouds. With the wind astern and the swell on the quarter, the sea gathered him in and swept him headlong up the Channel.

At ten in the morning he found the Rye fairway buoy. The swell was breaking on the shallow sand of the bay and George was wary of tackling the harbour entrance. He called the harbourmaster on the radio. No problem, the voice said: there was plenty of water, the approach was to be taken carefully on 329°, and George was to moor at the piles below the office before going on upriver to the town.

He clung to the bearing and watched the needle on the echo sounder sink lower and lower down the face of the dial. He could see surf ahead, stained brown with sand, and a wooden dolphin marking the entrance to the harbour.
Calliope
switch-backed in the swell. He hadn’t eaten for … he couldn’t remember when. He felt too jumpily alert for his own good. 325°. 334°. 329°. He locked the boat on the magic number and saw the surf part to disclose a narrow, canal-like avenue of smooth water dead ahead.

A man in uniform was waiting to take his ropes at the piles.

“Thanks,” George said. “How much do I owe you?—I’m only staying for one night—” and saw that the man was not the harbourmaster but a customs officer.

“If I might come aboard, sir?” He was already there; a heavy man whose big pink marshmallow face looked innocently mismatched with the black serge and the clipboard that made up the rest of him. “Come far today?”

“Just from the Solent.”

“And where, exactly, on the Solent, sir, did you come from?”

“Oh … Southampton Water. The Itchen side. Eling, I think it was called.”

“When did you leave?”

“About six o’clock last night.”

“And what sort of weather did you have, sir?”

George shrugged. “You know. Much like it is now.”

“You tell me, sir.”

“Why the interrogation?”

“It’s not an interrogation. I’m just curious, sir.”

“The wind was westerly, Force 4. Heavy swell from the sou’west. Visibility good. I was able to steer by the stars.”

The man was making notes with a biro. George’s temper was fraying, but he ached to be rid of the man’s officious bulk and felt that compliance was the safest route.

“This is a big boat for one man to handle on his own, isn’t it, sir?”

“I manage.”

“D’you mind if I have a look-see below?”

“No.”

But all the warmth and friendliness of the saloon vanished with the man’s presence there. George felt he was watching his life being burgled before his eyes. He saw the saloon as the man saw it: its untidy scatter of books and discarded clothes, the empty whisky tumbler, the unplumped cushions, the cracked case of the transistor radio, the saucepan which had dislodged itself from the galley and fallen under the saloon table. The
man was looking at Vera’s picture.

“Nice woodwork, sir.”

He opened lockers and drawers. In the forecabin, he rummaged through George’s socks and underpants. He lifted a floorboard and found the wine cellar in the forward bilges.

“Duty paid on these, sir?”

George pointed to the name of the English shipper on a bottle of Pomerol. The man nodded and turned to the chain locker.

George said: “You’ll find a tin full of money there, under a pile of chain.”

“Will I, sir?” The man’s eyes were as bland as a pair of poached eggs. He opened the locker door and reached inside. “Feels as if you’ve got a bit of a soft patch in the stem here …”

“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.