ANASTASIA: Thursday. Test results.
EVE: Oh. Good luck with that.
ANASTASIA: If you’re going to waste my time with meaningless phrases, you’d be better employed polishing a bit of paintwork.
EVE: Sorry.
ANASTASIA: Is there any paintwork left to polish?
EVE: We did have a little contretemps with another boat.
ANASTASIA: You mean you hit it.
EVE: No. We missed it.
ANASTASIA: Details?
EVE: We came round a bend and there was this boat in the middle of the canal, and I couldn’t quite remember all your instructions. But I promise you, I didn’t hit it.
ANASTASIA: What did you hit?
EVE: Trees.
ANASTASIA: Much damage?
EVE: No, only a few scratches. And one of the chairs fell in but we managed to fish it out again.
ANASTASIA: I knew you weren’t competent to deal with the unexpected. You’ll just have to remember to expect it.
EVE: We’ll try.
ANASTASIA: Maintenance regime?
EVE: Yes, oh yes. We’re doing that. No worry. Ticking and dating the boxes as instructed.
ANASTASIA: Where are you?
EVE: Hang on. Sally, where are we? Oh, Bridge 174, apparently.
ANASTASIA: As I suspected. Pathetic progress.
Call ended.
EVE: Anastasia? We got cut off.
ANASTASIA: We’d finished talking.
EVE: No, I just wanted to say, about Thursday, what will be will yoghurt pot.
ANASTASIA: Is that complete nonsense?
EVE: It is.
ANASTASIA: Good. Easy!
* * *
THEY HAD AGREED TO TAKE turns cooking.
“I should warn you, I’m not used to cooking for other people,” Eve said, “unless it’s in full-on entertaining mode, and I’m not about to do that sort of thing in these circumstances.”
“What sort of thing?” asked Sally.
“You know, three courses, at least one of them using ingredients you can only buy in Waitrose or an Indian shop on the other side of town.”
“I am used to cooking for other people,” Sally said, “but I’ve never used ingredients I couldn’t buy in Asda or done more than two courses. Or less, come to that. Duncan likes his puddings.”
“Please promise me you will not make puddings,” said Eve. “I’d only eat them.”
Sally cooked first. She sliced and chopped and threw everything into a pan and then turned it out what felt like seconds later, with a mound of rice, on to two plates.
“That was quick,” Eve said.
“I never hang about,” said Sally. “I seem to have been in a rush my whole life and now I don’t know why. I don’t know what it was that was so urgent I always had to wear shoes that fastened with Velcro so I didn’t have to waste time on laces.”
“This is delicious,” said Eve, shoveling it in. “I’m going to have to find a way of cooking that is in the middle ground between the dinner party and the ham sandwich. Actually, I’m looking forward to it.”
“Tell me,” said Sally, “about leaving your job. What happened?” Eve did not reply at once, busy spearing the last grains of rice with her fork. “Or don’t tell me, if you don’t want to.”
“You’re being conciliatory again,” Eve said. “Stop it at once. I was trying to work out whether I could tell you what happened without any bitterness, like you told me about the end of your marriage. Bitter, self-justifying people—such a bore. And I think, when I go over it in my head, I’m at risk of morphing into one. So this is my chance to stand back and be objective.
“Right. What happened was, Rambusch was taken over by an American conglomerate. I was part of the management team that put together all the performance data to support the takeover, the historical figures and our short- and long-term forecasts. Nothing we put in the documents was wrong, though we massaged the statistics a little. We chose scales for the graphs that made the fluctuations in performance look less dramatic; we presented the forecasts as a midpoint between best and worst case, when in fact they were between the in-your-dreams best and something not as bad as there was an outside chance it would be. But we told the truth.
“Anyhow, it all went swimmingly and we got big bonuses and settled down to be nice to our new owners. Only our new owners turned out to believe that if something goes wrong, the correct response is not to find out why and then to try and stop it happening again, but to find someone to blame. I can’t pretend there wasn’t already a flavor of this in the Rambusch Corporation. We, the management, were never very tolerant of people who appeared not to be taking their jobs seriously enough, but we were prepared to accept that screw-ups occurred when everyone had been doing their best, and that what lay behind the problem was a process failure or a market failure, or an unforeseeable combination of circumstances. The new parent company didn’t think like that. If we presented figures that showed quality defects had risen from 0.8 percent to 1.1 percent against a target of 0.5 percent, they would ask which of us deserved to be fired.”
“I can’t imagine having to cope with that,” said Sally.
“No. Believe me, it’s draining. The way round it, as far as my colleagues were concerned, was to lie. If you never showed the figures getting worse, there was nothing to blame anyone for, and their jobs were safe. By the time the truth came out, they would have been able, so they thought, to find a scapegoat. Then they could claim to be as shocked as their new bosses, while reassuring them that the people responsible had gone.”
“You were the scapegoat,” said Sally.
“Not exactly. The quality wasn’t my responsibility, but it was my job to provide updates to the plan and so I was the one signing off on the lies. And there were plenty of good reasons for the dip in quality that were no one’s fault: floods, strikes at suppliers—that sort of thing. Look, this isn’t boring, is it? I mean, you didn’t go into all this detail when I asked you how come you walked out of your marriage.”
“It’s not boring,” said Sally. “And I like the logic of it. This happened, and this was the result. I couldn’t explain walking out on Duncan like that. I wish I could.”
“Well, I wanted to tell the truth and describe all the problems to the board and my colleagues didn’t want me to. They were beginning to talk like their new masters, claiming the managers responsible for quality and the manufacturing plants must be made to do their jobs properly and the fault rate would miraculously improve, and we would be able to justify the blip retrospectively by pointing to the underperforming subordinates who had been shaken up.
“I couldn’t go along with it. I am prepared to tell a good story, but only if I feel I can back it up when challenged. And I said so. I was used to being heard, in that company, and to being listened to as an equal. I had never held back in the past, if I felt strongly about something, and if anything, this had worked in my favor. But this time I wasn’t criticizing business decisions, I was telling them what I thought about the way they were behaving. What I thought about them. No going back after that. All of a sudden, I just wasn’t one of them.”
“Did you still want to be?”
“Ah, the right question. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be able to tell you the answer by the time we get to Chester.”
As she cleaned her teeth in the tiny space in front of the tiny basin, Eve tried to recall the impotence and, because of the impotence, the anger she had felt through all the conversations about whether she would be happier in another (subordinate, nonexistent) role, or whether she felt her future lay elsewhere. How on earth, she thought, bracing her feet against the movement of the boat caused by a passing wash, could it ever have mattered so much?
* * *
SALLY WAS AT THE HELM. Eve sat beside her on a locker and looked around: at the sky, a fading vapor trail the only mark on its blue surface; at the reeds growing in the water where the bank had broken down, bowing to the Number One as it pas
sed; at the moored boats, carrying their badges of entitlement, their warning notices and padlocks; at Sally. Sally was watching the canal ahead. She was wearing a pair of brown corduroy jeans and a beige T-shirt. Her hair was neat, on the blond side of brown; her features were even and unremarkable.
Eve picked up the Nicholson Guide lying beside her.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Just passed Bridge 175,” said Sally.
Eve studied the Nicholson. “I’ve been thinking, anyone called Yasmin ought to be bold and colorful and unconventional. You need a complete makeover to bring out the inner Yasmin in you.”
“I’m not sure it’s there. Truly, I’m not. I know I talked about highlights, but all that’s a bit of wrapping paper. I’ll still be the same old parcel of nothing very exciting underneath.”
“When I joined Rambusch,” said Eve, “I was wearing M&S separates and behaved like it. You know what I mean. Or you may not, but the clothes I chose for work were diffident. They had that ‘not wanting to offend-ness,’ a sort of ‘don’t want to stand out-ness.’ The men all strutted about in suits and striped ties and pointy lace-ups and behaved as if they expected respect, demanding attention. I got the reaction I wanted, and so did they.”
“I can see where this is going, but you aren’t a diffident person and I am. I’m a definite M&S separates person.”
“But what you see now is where I’ve got to, not where I was. You don’t know how much I had to grow into the arrogant bitch I succeeded in becoming.”
“So you went out and bought a suit and high heels and started to strut? And that worked?”
“No, actually, it didn’t work too well because it wasn’t my style, but it was a step on the road.”
“And you think I ought to take the first step on the road to becoming Yasmin by jazzing myself up?”
“I do. Let’s stop in Rickmansworth. It’s a couple of locks and a mile away. It looks big enough to have a few charity shops. We’ll find something outrageous for you to wear.”
* * *
The moored boats stretched out for some distance before they reached the town, a trailing string of floating habitation guiding them into where the solid houses of solid citizens began. Eve, who was driving, throttled back as instructed by Anastasia to avoid the wash rocking the boats they passed. It also meant she was able to compare the Number One with the alternatives lined up along the towpath. Many were smarter, one or two were scruffier. None, she thought, managed to look as authentic as the Number One, quite as sensible and workmanlike. The scruffy boats were proclaiming the determination of the owners to be alternative. The smarter ones were all, to a greater or lesser degree, displaying in miniature the native habitat of the house owners whose holiday homes they were. The hire boats, at least, were uniform and bland, whereas some of the worst excesses of the privately owned were shockingly twee.
They found a space on a mooring near the road leading into town.
“Does it make you feel like a gypsy, driving into a new town in your home and walking about as a stranger?” Eve asked.
“No,” said Sally. “Not really. But it does feel like being on holiday. Are we on holiday?”
“I would say so.”
They found a charity shop where Eve picked out everything in Sally’s size—and more things were in her size than any other—that was brightly colored, seriously patterned, unconventionally styled, or all three. Sally took an armful of these into the curtained cubicle and came out wearing a black skirt with an asymmetric hemline and a broad band of red swooping from top left to bottom right. On top she wore a silver sleeveless T-shirt under a red T-shirt with slashes in it, and a black bolero jacket with embroidered flowers. There had been no one in the shop when she went into the changing room, but by the time she came out an elderly couple and a determined young woman had turned up and were clicking the hangers on the racks. Everyone—the strangers and Eve—stood still and looked at Sally as she struck the curtain aside and strode out among them. The color began to rise in her face.
“Nice jacket,” said the younger woman, turning back to the trouser rail. “I wish I could get away with something like that.”
“It suits you,” said the older woman.
Sally ducked back into the cubicle and, having checked the other shoppers had left, came out in an Indian cotton sundress.
“I knew you were a Yasmin,” said Eve.
On the next street they passed a hairdresser who was able to do highlights, if they came back in an hour. They ate lunch in a café, then Eve went back to the Number One and swabbed all horizontal surfaces, inside and out, until Yasmin returned, the bright pink flecks in her hair brightening up the drabness of her clothes.
“That’ll clash with the red T-shirt,” said Eve.
“Good.”
3
To Milton Keynes
ON EITHER SIDE OF the canal were fields, pasture, hedges, sheep. If there were buildings and roads, they were penned in behind the contours and the trees and might as well not have been there. Sally was at the tiller of the Number One, wearing a turquoise top, her head tilted up as if the color in her hair had weight, was lifting her chin in counterbalance, forcing her to take a longer, loftier view. There was a boat moored ahead, just before a bridge. It was the sort of gray that is the faded remains of other, more purposeful colors. On the rear deck and the roof were bundles of wood, a wheelbarrow, plastic drums full of soil and dead or wilting vegetables, tarpaulins, lengths of rope and hoses, randomly cast down. The name on the stern, fittingly, was Grimm. Sitting on the grassy bank by the bridge was a slight figure which stood up as the Number One approached and held up both arms in a curious, imperious gesture. Sally had already slowed for the bridge and the moored boat, and now reduced speed further. She could see that the figure was female, wearing a summer dress in a style from the fifties, full-skirted, tight-waisted. Her hair was cut short and square and stood out round her head at the same angle as her skirt stood out round her legs, making her look as if she was composed of triangles.
Eve came up from below.
“Help,” said the figure when they were within earshot. She said it with no volume or emphasis, more a command than a request.
Sally put the Number One into reverse and they came to a halt, the bow nudging the bridge, the back a few feet behind the gray boat, which was shorter in length.
“What sort of help have you got in mind?” asked Eve.
Noah, who had been lying on his back with all his undercarriage exposed when Eve left the cabin, appeared through the door, right way up and moving at the speed of an empty plastic bottle approaching a weir. He skipped from the Number One to the back of the other boat, to the towpath, and had buried his nose between the legs of the figure on the bank by the time Eve had finished her question. Toppling backward under the pressure of paws and muzzle, the girl sat down and folded her arms round the wriggling body of the dog.
“Noah, Noah, no, no, Noah!” she shouted.
Another boat began to inch through the bridge toward them, and Sally reversed and maneuvered the Number One to sit alongside the towpath behind Grimm. The oncoming barge cruised past them, the middle-aged couple on the stern staring at the tangle of dog and girl on the grass.
“I said,” repeated Eve, “what sort of help?”
“Oh,” the girl stood up and shook herself. Noah dropped from her lap and lay down on the towpath, at once, so it seemed, asleep. “It won’t go.” She jerked her head toward the gray barge, bobbed hair flaring out then landing, strand by strand, back in the same position. “Where’s Anastasia?”
“In Uxbridge.”
“How can she be in Uxbridge when the Number One is here in front of me? It’s way, way too far to walk from there to here, so how can she be in Uxbridge?”
“Nevertheless, she is,” said Eve.
“Who are you, then?” asked the girl, bending down to grip Noah’s muzzle with both hands and blowing up his nose.
Sally pro
vided both their names. Eve wasn’t sure that was what the girl meant, but she seemed satisfied.
“Trompette,” she said.
Eve was convinced she had misheard this, that the girl had managed to wrap up a sneer in some phrase in French or a nonsense word.
“Trompette?” said Sally.
“Yes.”
“Are you on your own on the boat, Trompette?”
“No. There’s Billy.”
“Where’s Billy?”
“Oh, yes, he could sort it,” said Trompette, as if responding to the next question rather than the last one. “But he’s smashed.”
“I see.”
Noah had wandered off down the towpath in search of smells.
“When you say it won’t go,” said Eve, “do you mean the engine won’t go, or it won’t drive the boat?”
“The engine’s all right,” said Trompette.
Eve stepped onto the back of the gray barge and opened what she now knew was called a weed hatch, which gave a view of the rudder. The shadow of the bridge and the muddiness of the water meant she could see nothing at all. She sank her hand down into the opaque wetness, watching her spread fingers as they took on the green then the brown of the water until they were deep enough to be without light at all. It felt slimy, viscous, surprisingly warm. And empty. She lay down on her stomach and reached farther in. She found a soft, ticklish frond, seized hold of it and pulled upward. It broke the surface to reveal itself as a strand of rope—which was a relief as there were other, more organic possibilities in her mind as her hand made the upward journey.
Only a foot or so of the rope cleared the surface; the rest remained tethered in the depths.
“Do you remember what Anastasia said about the washing line?” she asked.
“I do,” said Sally. “She said we’d only let it trail over the side and it would get wrapped round the rudder.”
Trompette was sitting cross-legged on the cabin roof eating an apple which she had produced without apparently disturbing her triangular clothing or entering the boat.
The Narrowboat Summer Page 5