Foreign Land (50 page)

Then (was the boat sailing into the fog or the fog marching forward to include the boat?) he could see nothing. Even
Calliope’s
bow was fuzzed and grey in the deep blind twilight of the fog. He listened for horns. Silence. Nor were there any vessels calling on the VHF overhead. It seemed to George that the boat was turning in slow circles as the fog swirled, but the compass said no; they were locked on a course of 269° with the card hardly stirring in its bowl.
Calliope
lurched once, but so gently that the wake might have come from a ship several miles off. In the smooth water a ship’s wake could travel a long way unhindered, and you couldn’t say with any certainty if it signalled an imminent collision or was the ghostly echo of a
vessel long since departed.

“In this sort of water, you see, a wake can travel one hell of a long way,” George said, speaking to Teddy, whom he saw sitting at the chart table, glooming over the soundings and the double daggers of the wrecks.

Calliope
emerged from the fog with the abruptness of a train coming out of a tunnel. It took less than a minute for impenetrable dusk to change to a blue morning under a sunny sky. The English Channel was an unruffled lake, hemmed in by chalky, Himalayan cliffs. At noon, there was no problem about finding the sun; George would have needed the darkest glass on the sextant to shield his eyes from its blazing image. The trouble was that the cliffs blotted out the horizon. There was no question of taking a sight.

At 1500, it was clear to the south, though there were still fog peaks and hills to the north and east. George went out into the cockpit and brought the westering sun down until it touched the horizon in the mirror. 1508 and 11 seconds. 43° dead on. He returned to the wheelhouse and started to figure it out, covering a page of the log with calculations. The intercept on the position line put him at 50° 03’ N and 4° 32’ W. If he’d done his sums right, and the sextant angle was correct, then the tide must have carried him much further south and west than his position by dead reckoning. St Cadix was about 20 miles away to the north and already beginning to drift astern. There were two things that he wanted to settle there (he could have done them both in an hour); but never mind, they were not that important. He reset his course, aiming to pass well wide of the Lizard.

At 0015 he was joined by a school of porpoises. Their phosphorescent tracks went criss-crossing round his bows. He saw the shiny humps of their backs in the water as they came racing in from the beam, playing friendly games in the night. The horizon was clear. George climbed on to the wheelhouse roof and hauled the two red riding lights up the mizzen mast to signal Vessel Not Under Command. Then he slept for an hour and a half—a shallow, anxious sleep disturbed by rather too
vivid dreams of the looming sides of ships.

His next sun sight put him at 90 miles northwest of Ushant. Sheila, smelling of bathtime, craned over his shoulder as he scribbled figures in the log.

The BBC shipping forecast at 1355 came a little faintly over the transistor set. Through the crackles of static he heard that the Azores High was still drifting northeast and intensifying. The barograph in the saloon was showing 1033 now. What wind there was came out of the hazy sky from the north, but the air in the boat was warm and Gulf Streamy. The forecast for Biscay was Variable, 3 or less, Visibility moderate. It was balmy picnic high-pressure weather. On the time signal at 1400, George turned his watch back to Greenwich Mean Time.

He saw the tunnymen as a line of spidery type on the haze ahead. He switched on the VHF to see if they were talking, and the wheelhouse filled with a deafening burst of Spanish. The language threw George for a moment; it was Portuguese, comically distorted in a concave mirror. He listened intently, hoping to find out what the fleet was doing, and heard an overwrought baroque story about a cardinal and a transvestite whore. In Spanish it was funnier than it would have been in English; George laughed and repeated the punchline aloud.

He steered
Calliope
cautiously through the floating village of boats built like giant smoothing irons, broad in the beam with pointed bows and long flat sterns. They tittupped gently on the lazy swell with their engines stopped. They were in luck. Rodsmen in yellow oilskins lined their sterns, yanking silver skipjack over their heads as fast as they could keep their arms pumping. They were spraying the sea with blood, and round each boat the water boiled with tuna. The tunnymen’s after-decks were stacked solid with glittering heaps of dead fish.

Someone was calling to George from the deckhouse of the nearest boat. He went out into the cockpit and cupped his hands to his ears.

“¿Qué?” he shouted.

“¿Quiere pescado?” The voice came in as a reedy whisper
on the wind.

“Gracias! Si, por favor!”

He motored in close across the water. He could hear the hammering of the newly-caught tuna as they thrashed in the scuppers, kicking up a delirious commotion with what little was left of their lives. A man in a woolly hat with a face as dark as a Creole’s threw two fish across to
Calliope
. They thumped wetly on the cabin roof and rolled on to the deck, where they lay against the toerail like a pair of small torpedoes.

“¿Quiere más? Hay mucho!”

“No, es perfecto! Muchas gracias.”

“¿Adonde va?”

“Bastante lejos.”

“¿En ese pequeño barco?”

“Es bastante grande para mí.”

“Buena suerte!”

“Gracias! Y a usted!”

He slipped past the last of the fleet. The sea was as wide open as the sky. Far bluer than the constrained and muddy British seas, it was the colour of a blue brocade ribbed with silver thread. The depth sounder, whose scale went up to forty fathoms, had stopped registering long ago, but George was keeping an eye on the black ant march of his pencilled crosses on the chart. They were over the Continental Shelf now, with the ground plunging away from under the boat. There were a thousand metres of water below, then two thousand, three thousand, four thousand. The sea was deeper than mountains were high.

Soaring clear of the falling ground,
Calliope
was flying, windborne, sustained on her diaphanous skin of blue water. Somewhere deep down, deeper than you could imagine, lay the dark and sludgy plain of ocean—the bottom of the world. Floating over it, George felt the floor sway a little underfoot. If there were monsters down there in the slime, he guessed they must be friendly monsters; blind herbivores, nourished on mud.

Invisible tunnymen were talking on the radio still. He
switched them off—he had no need of other voices now. He stepped below, poured himself a prim quarter tumblerful of Chivas Regal, and watched the whisky wrinkle in the glass. Beyond the porthole, the sea was beginning to darken and the rags of hazy cloud were turning ochre and mauve.

“Cheers,” he said and took a single sip. The last dickering beam of sunlight was lighting the wool of the Wolof rug on the floor. He sat, arms spreadeagled on the starboard side settee, and felt the valves of his heart pumping blood in foxtrot time. The sea chuckled at his back, the abyss opened under the keel; but for now, with the barograph needle inking an even track up at the top of the turning drum, George was home and dry.