The Narrowboat Summer

by Anne Youngson

  The following morning, she took the plan to the pre-arranged meeting at the Number One and laid out copies in front of Anastasia and Sally. Anastasia picked hers up and wriggled her lips, hummed a tune and put it down again.

  “That much is obvious,” she said.

  Sally looked down at hers as if it were an exam paper. Finally, she looked up.

  “Does this mean we’re going to do it?” she asked.

  “It means I can’t see any reason why we shouldn’t,” Eve said. “How about you?”

  “I need a bit more time,” said Sally.

  As they left the boat the day before, Eve had detected in Sally a suspicion of the “let’s just go for it” attitude she so despised. Now she feared the opposite: that Sally would turn out to be one of those people who, when the plan had been put together and agreed by all parties, took fright and could not be persuaded to set off along the path. She understood one thing, though, as a result of Sally’s reaction. She herself really, really wanted to do this.

  * * *

  What had seemed possible while sitting on the Number One with those two extraordinary women in front of her, felt like a fantasy to Sally—worse, a joke, ridiculous—as she put her key into the lock of 42 Beech Grove. Just the idea of framing the words she would have to use to explain what she was thinking (dreaming) of doing was beyond her. The house was so emphatically the same. The disposition of its contents, its particular smell, the minor blemishes on its walls and floors, the angle at which the sun fell through the kitchen window onto the tiled floor, were mocking her with their familiarity, their permanence.

  Yet she had said the most unthinkable words already. She had sat beside Duncan at the kitchen table and told him she could no longer go through the motions of being the person everyone thought she was happy to be: wife, mother, classroom assistant, resident of 42 Beech Grove. As she talked, Duncan’s eyes never met hers but stayed on the cover of a magazine lying on the table between them. A TV Guide for the next week with a photo on the cover of one of those women with perfect faces and a name beginning with K—Katie or Keira or Kylie. A flake of crust from the bread she had cut to make sandwiches at lunchtime had landed on the photo and was obscuring one of the famous K’s front teeth. It made her look as if some disease or lack of hygiene had led to the formation of a yellowish crust on the perfection of her pearly white molar. Sally reached out a hand to brush it away, because it didn’t seem fair to leave her like that, but stopped the movement, not wanting to let it appear she had allowed her attention to be diverted, in the middle of destroying her husband’s life, by a stray, disfiguring crumb.

  Duncan was a man who never stopped talking, who shared his every thought with her as it came into his mind, and she had expected a torrent of words. Instead, he said, “I need to think about this,” and left the room. Only later did she realize he had left the house. She heard him come back in the middle of the night and go into the room that used to be her son’s bedroom when he lived at home. All he had said to her since, as he left for work in the morning, was: “You know I love you.” That was it. All day, having her hair cut, meeting Anastasia and Eve, forming the plan for the Number One, walking home, she had been tasting freedom. But the house whispered to her, as she put the new, pink umbrella in the pot where the other umbrellas lived, did you think it would be that easy? Did you really think you were getting away?

  She let the evening pass. Nothing was said, on any topic, by either of them. They ate a meal Sally had cooked in an unnatural, uncomfortable silence. After all, Sally thought, no rush; Eve might not agree to go, and she felt the bitter taste of disappointment at the thought.

  Then she went back to the Number One and Eve came up with a piece of paper that made it all real. Sally could make no sense of the plan—it was all nonsense, too complicated, she thought, too much detail for what would be simple, once they got started. If they could only decide to start. And in the end, even that turned out to be simple. She said to Duncan:

  “I’ve met a couple of women who want me to help them take a canal boat up to Chester.”

  “Are you going?”

  “I thought I might.”

  “It’s up to you, obviously.” He licked his fingers and picked up the last crumbs of cake on his plate. “But it sounds like a good idea. You should do it.”

  Her relief that he did not have an opinion, need to discuss the ins and the outs, want to analyze the pros and the cons, as she had expected, was tempered with a fear that it was too easy. He had not believed her when she said the marriage was over, was thinking this would be “a little holiday” that would make her see sense and the problem would go away.

  “It will give you time to sort things out,” she said, collecting up the empty plates. “What you want to do. About the house and so on.”

  “Lots to do, yes,” he said. “Lots to think about.”

  The next day she went back to the Number One and declared her readiness to go ahead with Eve’s Easy Plan.

  * * *

  THEY ALL HAD THINGS THEY felt they needed to do first and they went their separate ways to do them.

  Eve had thought of her life as full. She had made sure of filling it, and the surest way of achieving that was to be always looking ahead, planning for the next change. So in theory, this should have been a simple process for her. Going away for a few months—she was used to doing that. But previously, any change she had made had been within a structure she understood; it was not until now, on the verge of changing everything—where she lived, how she spent her days, who she spent her days with—that she understood the boundaries that had enabled her to make decisions easily, because the choices were limited and familiar.

  Her childhood had set the pattern. The only child of peripatetic parents, she had bounced between boarding school, her mother’s family in the rural Midlands, and Dubai or Hong Kong or wherever else her father, a civil engineer, had found work building bridges. Each of these environments had been unlike the others. Her school had been highly polished, a place of hard surfaces and restricting walls and intermittent silence and clatter. Wherever her parents lived was hot, full of color and texture, and—because she was never anywhere long enough to know it—unknowable. Her grandmother and her mother’s extended family lived their lives out of doors, in a green landscape which was always, in memory at least, cold and wet, but where every house was a pocket of coziness. She fitted in to each of these places. She knew where she stood. Even if she sometimes felt she belonged nowhere.

  So it had been at university, then at Rambusch. She would have said, as one of an insignificant minority of women in both places—she studied mechanical engineering—that she fitted in, and as she worked her way up the hierarchy at Rambusch, from design engineer to team leader to project manager to director level, she had begun to think she did belong. Until she found out she didn’t. Her career, like her childhood, had been spent on the move: from one plant to another, one office to another, one project to another. She’d always known that in a month, a year, two years she would be somewhere else doing something else, but inside the scaffolding that was Rambusch. She had managed her relationships in the same way. Never expecting or wanting permanence, always looking past the man she was with in anticipation of what came next, which might (and she was fine with this) be solitude.

  She made choices all the time—which role to accept, when to start and when to end a relationship—but always knowing the boundaries, the parameters. Now she was without boundaries, and this meant she had an infinity of choices and no certainties. It was unsettling. She did not want to accept being unsettled. As she stood in her flat wondering what to do next, she found herself looking in the direction of the bin where she had thrown the notice from the display in Rambusch’s reception area. She had been constructed from production parts, all this time, while thinking she had chosen the life she led. When she had as much free will as the hydraulic fluid that kept the display moving, going round and round in a purposeless loop.


  Now was not the time to waver, she reminded herself. She would do what she always did, and did well: look for practical solutions to practical problems. She went through her flat selecting what to take, what to leave, what to throw out. She went through her contacts selecting who to tell, who not to tell, who to delete. In both cases, the first category was the smallest.

  * * *

  Sally had to go to the school where she worked as a classroom assistant and arrange to have the rest of the term off. She walked there; she always walked there. Her life was made up of such repetitions. She was a victim of routine, but as soon as this thought occurred to her, on the walk to the school, she repudiated the word “victim.” If she had been trapped, it was because she had allowed it to happen. She could step out now because she was not a victim; she had control.

  She did not anticipate any problems in securing leave—unpaid, of course. The school was looking for ways to save money, and the child who had been her special charge was in hospital for an extended stay. She would miss him; the way he rolled his head against the back of his wheelchair to look up at her; his smile, which might not have looked like a smile to anyone else in the classroom but that let her know he was happy, despite his inability to control his own limbs or articulate his thoughts. She would have missed him more, though, if she had stayed to the end of term, his absence not pasted over but emphasized by the chatter and clamor of those children lucky enough to have been born without a disability. She would miss them, too, of course, but they did not need her. Any more than her own children needed her now.

  Her daughter and her son had reacted to her decision to leave their father in the ways she would have expected them to react. Amy had talked at her—much as she had thought Duncan would do, when she told him, but he had not. Amy had lost herself in a tangle of emotions expressed largely in recalling incidents from family life (“You were happy then, weren’t you?”) and in comparison with other mothers who had or had not behaved as she was behaving (“I mean, I’d always expected her to do that!”). Beneath all this was the question Sally could not yet fully answer to her own satisfaction: why?

  Mark, the quiet one, had said little but looked sad. She found herself starting to apologize to him, but stopped herself. She had no idea what was causing the sadness he was not expressing. Though so much more like her than Amy was, he was the bigger mystery to her.

  The conversations with Duncan continued to be eerily short, abnormally to the point. Arrangements for paying the bills; the addresses of the post offices they would pass en route where she would pick up her mail. He had accepted, without argument or analysis, that she was going on this trip. How much more than the trip he had accepted, she could not tell.

  When she arrived at the school, Sally found the Head was, or was pretending to be, disappointed and angry that she was leaving early. This was unexpected. Sally kept calm by looking at a drawing of an octopus, colored pink with yellow spots, pinned up on the wall. Behind, Sally thought, the Head’s head; she felt childishly pleased with this thought. Whatever the woman said, it was so much noise. Nothing was going to stop her now.

  * * *

  Anastasia, it appeared, had set about throwing things out. Though the boat had looked to be empty of everything not strictly necessary, or even emptier, yet when they arrived at the end of the first day of preparation for a review of the next steps, there were several trash bags to be carried to the nearest bins. But her main concern was to introduce them to the boat, and all its workings.

  “It’s called the Number One,” she told them, “because that was what the people who owned their own boat and plied for trade up and down the canals were known as. Professionals, in other words. I expect you to bear that in mind. You might be amateurs, but I need you to take the business of managing the boat as seriously as if you weren’t.”

  Starting at the stern, where the engine was, lesson one was maintenance. Eve had assumed she wouldn’t need to concentrate to absorb this part of the tour, given her familiarity with the moving parts of machinery more complicated than the old Perkins diesel that drove the boat. Anastasia, however, was so detailed, so insistent and so certain they would let her down, Eve had to jog up the towpath to a garage on the main road and buy a notebook in which all of this, and subsequent lessons, could be recorded.

  After the maintenance came the driving. They traveled a mile north, through a lock, turned round and traveled the mile back. The weather had given itself a shake and was dry, bright and breezy. Within half an hour, Eve had gone from outrage at being expected to move forward so slowly to a happy contempt for motorists driving across the bridge they passed beneath, who thought such speed was necessary.

  They moved on to equipping the boat with what was needed to provide Eve and Sally with a level of comfort and utility that was, if not within sight of what they were used to, at least within faint hailing distance. Anastasia was tight-lipped about their list of essentials, and gave herself the right of veto over anything coming on board. Out of Sally’s range of kitchen tools for chopping, slicing and mincing, only two knives made it past the gatekeeper.

  “What, you think it’s so important to have more than one way of chopping things up you’d risk pounds of metal and plastic smashing my cupboard doors every time you hit a lock gate? Which will be every time you go into a lock.”

  Her washing line was also rejected.

  “It’ll go overboard and wrap itself round the prop before you’ve gone a dozen miles. And you don’t need it. I have my own system, which is utterly foolproof. Or I hope it is. I don’t think I’ve let a fool near it before now.”

  Eve was prevented from taking her hair dryer, iPod dock and electric toothbrush.

  “The batteries aren’t connected to the national grid, as you’d realize if you used your brain.”

  They both brought quantities of books and both had to take most of them home again.

  “You’re meant to be going to Chester, not sitting in an armchair surrounded by unnecessary, unsecured ballast.”

  They spent a day moving Anastasia into Eve’s flat. This was superficially simple because she could fit all she needed into two carrier bags, but it felt delicate. She began to diminish as she walked away from the boat. She never looked back at it, as they went down the towpath to the bridge where Sally had parked her husband’s car, but the effort involved in leaving it was engraved in every wrinkle, every unyielding fold of practical fabric, every wheezing breath. In the car, she seemed smaller than she had been, as though this contact with a high-speed, terrestrial world was drying out some vital fluid. Noah came with them, to avoid someone else being ambushed by his unearthly pleas for release, and even though he rattled around in the rear compartment commenting on the experience in falsetto, Anastasia said not a word of reproach.

  At the flat, Eve and Sally went into the kitchen to make lunch. They could hear Anastasia moving round, muttering. When they came out with the plates of sandwiches, she was in the middle of the living room, looking aggressive and thus reassuringly more like the woman of the Number One.

  “There’s some things you’re going to need to do for me before you go, because I don’t have the strength to do them for myself.”

  It took most of the rest of the day to strip the flat of all its softness. Eve would have described her own style as verging on minimalist, but as they sat drinking tea in the environment Anastasia finally declared acceptable, she realized how wrong she had been. She liked the result. Whenever she took on a new department at work, she had applied the “zero budget” approach to identifying the essence and eliminating the padding. Start from the assumption that there is no money and no staff, then assume there is just enough of both for the first essential function to be delivered with maximum efficiency: how much and how many would that be? Add the second essential function, and so on, leaving the inessential on the shelf and emerging with a lean and powerful organization. That at least was the theory. Egos, politics, long-established rights, employmen
t law and other flies had always prevented her from applying the ointment smoothly. Now she thought the same principle could be adopted in relation to her living quarters. Remove everything and stop adding things back in when a state of perfect functionality had been achieved.

  As they cleared up in the kitchen, Eve said to Sally: “Anastasia’s not a woman who holds back from expressing an opinion.”

  “I admire that,” Sally said. “I’ve gone through life working out what it is that the person I’m talking to would like me to say, and saying it. I’m forever being nice.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being nice. I have a tendency to be a bit confrontational. I’m thinking I must try to be more like you. Nice.”

  “I’ll try to be more like you, then. Direct.”

  When the rearrangement was complete, they played Scrabble. Eve was better at Scrabble than most of her friends; Sally was as good as she was, as far as she could judge. Anastasia was in a completely different league. Not only did she know words they had never dreamed of (aecia), she was able to pull off tricks like adding “esca” to the beginning of “late,” and managed to use all her letters making “subterfuge” out of “fug.” It was a pleasure, Eve told her, to be beaten by someone with such a mastery of the game.

  “There’s a set on the Number One,” said Anastasia. “If you practice, you might improve. Don’t lose any of the tiles. I’ll be counting them when I get the boat back.”