Foreign Land (45 page)

This was most peculiar. They’d never called Marsland Midships. Midships was a man named Peters, who had indeed been famous for his zig-zag courses. Why on earth should Marsland want to hijack someone else’s nickname? The cadet whom George knew was a colourless public schoolboy who seemed totally careless of his impact on other people. Not that the impact had been much: he was someone whom no-one would remember unless they actually saw him. Yet all that time Marsland must have been aching for the kind of popularity that went with a nickname, to the point where he’d
finally been driven to stealing another man’s.

“Ah, yes,” George said. “Of course. Midships.”

“I don’t think we called you anything, did we?” Marsland said, with bulging complacency.

“No. Grey by name and grey by nature, I’m afraid.”

“Didn’t think so.”

George bought ten metres of rope for his new mizzen sheet. Marsland cut it with an electric gadget that melted the strands into a hard plastic knob at the end. George said: “Remember old Prynne?”

“Prynne? No, I don’t think so. Was he one of us?”

Paying at the till, George answered Marsland’s question about what he was doing in Lyme Regis.

Marsland said: “Sounds too bloody lonely by half.”

“No—I don’t find it lonely at all.”

“What, you mean, with all the piss-ups ashore and so forth?”

George didn’t try to put the man right. As he left the shop, ducking between racks of jerseys, captains’ hats and yellow stormgear, he heard Marsland call, “Good old Pwllheli!”

He waited for the sea, watching it inch over the sand beyond the harbour mouth. His timing was going to be too fine for comfort. According to the almanac, the tide would begin to sweep east round Portland Bill at 1600, but High Water at Lyme was not until 1708. If
Calliope
floated at half-tide, say 1400 hours, he wouldn’t make Portland much before 1800 or even later. The longer he waited, the darker and fiercer would be his passage round the Bill. He leaned over the stern rail: a trickle of dun-coloured water was nudging a sodden cigarette pack along the dry bottom.

At 1400
Calliope
was still leaning against the wall, her squashed fenders as hard as lumps of concrete. At 1415 George, sitting in the saloon, felt the boat shift a few inches and heard the fenders sigh. It wasn’t until 1440 that she floated
free and he was able to rid her of the cat’s cradle of ropes that tied her to Lyme Regis. Going astern, he held his breath, expecting the keel to grind on sand at any moment, but she slid past the pier head without touching and he brought her round and pointed her at Portland Bill, on a course of 134°.

Sails were useless in the strengthening headwind from the southeast. The boat lumbered on under engine, bucking the sullen, spitting little waves. It was cold and sunless. George watched the wind anxiously. The shipping forecast had said it would be Force 3 to 4. This felt like 4, a rather solid and intimidating 4, at that. No problem here, but round the Bill it would blow straight into the tide and raise a tricky sea. He was tempted to put back into Lyme but was deterred by the prospect of sharing the same town as Marsland. At 1700 the wind lost its heart and drifted round into the east. The tops of the waves stopped breaking and turned to milky green spun glass.

It was twilight before the boat was running in the lee of Chesil Beach. The unearthly level straightness of its piled shingle looked as bleak as a line in a ledger. Nothing seemed to grow on it. He could see no people. Even the sea, sucking along its edge, seemed repelled by it. It had the comfortlessness of a cold outpost of Sahara; though the Sahara, George thought, at least had some curves to its name. There were no curves on Chesil Beach. For more than a mile in front, and many miles behind, it stretched away, ruled and rigid, as unfriendly a coast as George had ever seen.

He had brought the bottle of Chivas Regal up into the wheelhouse to help him get round Portland Bill. He filled his pipe and set it beside the wheel.

He saw the beach quicken as the tide got
Calliope
in its grip. He steered in as close as he dared to the speeding shingle and watched the lighthouse ahead. Every twenty seconds four rapid powerful flashes lit the water and showed it as a rumpled black oilskin. In the long interval between the flashes, George was blind. The compass light shone like a pinprick on the floating card. Each time the lighthouse flashed, he checked the
bearing of the boat against the shore and clung to the number. 180°. 184°. 177°. The ragged, shadowy edge of the Bill was slithering past, fifty yards off, and he could see the tide heaping up against its low cliffs in the strobelike pulses of the turning light, as high above him now as the moon. 174°. 171°. 165°.
Calliope
shot round the point, stumbling and sliding in the fast water. Her steering kept on going suddenly slack as if the chains had fallen out of connection with the rudder. Caught in an eddy, she lurched, lost her heading, and George found himself pointed straight at the shore. He hauled her round again, fighting the current.

“That’s it! Easy now—
easy!
” He was shouting. “We’re fine. Careful … nicely! Watch this one—yes! And round we go, come on—come on! There you are!”

The Race was there—over to seaward, an amazing tumble of white, caught for a half-second in the lighthouse beam. The sea was standing up on end, in blocklike pyramids, and it was growling at him. George could hear it over the noise of the engine, a continuous, bass, thunder of water against water. It seemed impossible that the sea could ever make a sound like that, it was so deep, so ripe with animal malevolence, the sort of sound that you expected to hear only in bad dreams.

Calliope
skidded sideways and made for the breakers. He wrenched her back on course. Between the Race and the lighthouse there was—not the “smooth passage” of the pilot book, but a gap of black, corrugated, roiling water, the width of a city street. Spinning the spokes of the wheel, hearing the chains grumble, he threaded the boat into the gap, and held on tight as she see-sawed her way through in a caul of spray. The short steep waves felt rock-like; the frames of the boat jarred each time she struck. George was as afraid of running on to the beach as he was of being sucked into the Race: the sand was at his elbow, flying by. In the Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash of the beam, he saw a notice saying NO BATHING zip past the rail to port—and a stranded motor tyre—and a bucket—and someone’s shoe.

“Yes!” he said. “Yes! Yes! We’re almost there! Now,
watch
it, will you! Easy … easy. Beautiful. You see? It’s tailing off now. The land’s slowed down. We’re well past the bad bit. Don’t you think?”

Through the open wheelhouse door he could hear the growl of the Race coming from astern now, and the lighthouse was throwing the boat’s shadow ahead of her on the water. He drank from the bottle. Whisky splashed on his throat; he had whisky in his beard. He had some trouble in screwing the cap back on, his hands shook so much. But it was a happy fever. George said, “Did you ever see anything like that before? Christ, but that was bloody magnificent—wasn’t it?”

He still had the shakes when he turned into Weymouth and slipped under the banked lights of the Sealink ferries on their moorings. He was shaky when he stepped on to the quay with his ropes. He crouched under a streetlamp, doing and undoing a bowline knot that wouldn’t come out right. Finally he had to recite,
“Over
and
under
and
over
and
round
and
over
and
under
and
through”
a raw cadet again.

A sweetshop and tobacconist’s was open on the quay. George stood in a daze in front of the coloured chocolate bars. Full of the sea, he had lost the words you needed for the shore. He said, “ … writing paper—have you?”

“No, all we’ve got is the cards,” the man said, making no sense at all. He pointed at a carousel of views of Weymouth, tit-and-bum blondes, kittens, drunkards and naked children on lavatories.

On one card, a young man was dragging a girl upstairs. He was carrying a carton of ice cream. The captain said,
Quick, dear, before it gets soft!
George had a few moments’ difficulty in working out the joke. When he got it, he stood in front of the carousel, wagging his head slowly from side to side.

He said: “No paper at all?”

“Only wrapping paper.”

“I suppose these’ll have to do, then.” He shovelled the cards out of the stand in handfuls. Cards spilled round his feet. The shopman gathered them up and put them in a bag for him.

“You must have a big family,” the man said.

“No. Just one daughter.”

He carried his cards to the bistro along the quay. His stall was poorly lit by a candle on top of a frozen fountain of wax. George asked for a carafe of white wine, spread the first five cards in a row on the red-checkered tablecloth, and settled down to write.

T
he peace summit, the car workers’ strike and the two per cent rise in the mortgage rate were elbowed out of the radio news by the gale. In Wiltshire, a motorcyclist was squashed by a falling tree; he was taken to hospital but found to be dead on arrival. The Severn Bridge was closed to traffic. In Gloucester a whirlwind removed the roofs of three homes on a council estate. A Fleetwood trawler was missing, presumed lost, in the Irish Sea. Two warships collided in Plymouth Sound; the cost of the damage sustained was estimated to be in excess of £l.6m. Ferry services to the Continent were suspended, though a spokesman from the British Airports Authority stated that flights from Heathrow were operating normally. An elderly woman died in Northampton when her garden shed collapsed in winds of speeds said by the Meteorological Office to be more than 80mph. Power cables were down in many areas, and flooding was reported in places as far apart as Peeblesshire and Dartford, Kent. Late news just in announced that all train services in and out of Liverpool Street were severely disrupted and passengers should expect long delays.

To begin with, Sheila had taken the cards for some sort of
awful schoolboy joke. The first to arrive had been Weymouth Pier, although it was numbered 4 in a scrawled circle on its top left-hand corner. It was followed in the next post by
Go on, Dick—the further you’re in the nicer it feels!
(11) and
We can’t have that dangling—it’ll have to come off!
(17). Number 1 (a view of Lulworth Cove) came the next morning, along with six more, including
All Henry wants to do is stay home every night and play with my pussy!
(13), a donkey in a straw hat (3) and
Look at my husband making his little what-not stand!
(24). This last was the only one that was signed. It ended: “Good night, Sheila. I love you. Daddy.”

The words made her want to scream.

By lunchtime on the second day of the deluge, she could no longer bear to pick up the mail herself. She heard the soft riffle of letters through the flap in the front door as a violation. She sent Tom to get them.