“That’s not a washing line,” she said. “That’s a mooring rope.”
“She warned us about that, too,” said Sally.
Eve looked over the side of the boat and saw that only one rope, tied to the roof rail, was being used to hold the gray barge to the bank.
“Are you short of a mooring rope, by any chance?” she asked.
Trompette flicked her apple core into the air. Noah came hurtling down the towpath and arrived in time to catch it as it fell.
“Looks like it,” she said.
“Well,” said Eve, waving the loose, frayed end she still held, “there’s your fault. From what Anastasia told us, the only way to sort it is to cut through it, strand by strand.”
There was a pause. When no one else had spoken or moved for some moments, Sally said:
“Will Billy do that? When he’s not smashed, I mean.”
Trompette lay down flat on her back. Noah lay down on his stomach.
“He could, but you see we need a pump-out. I want to move now.”
“You shouldn’t have let the fucking rope trail in the water, then, should you?” Eve pointed out. “And never mind about Billy, can’t you do it?”
“If I had to,” said Trompette.
Eve looked at the scummy water then at Trompette’s triangular perfection, and then at Sally, who smiled at her. Then she lay down on her stomach again.
It took an hour with her arms in the water for Eve to clear the tangled rope, using a knife Trompette found for her, a wooden-handled clasp knife with a very sharp blade. There was some satisfaction in it. The sun on the nape of her neck, the small triumphs as pieces of rope came loose, the narrow limits to the problem—three square feet of water three inches from her face—and the weight of Noah’s body propped up against her legs. As well as the feeling of triumph when the last piece pulled free. Eve closed the knife and slid it into her jeans pocket. She put her arm into the water one last time and ran her fingers over the smooth surface of the shaft.
“Done,” she said, standing up.
They moved off in convoy, the Number One ahead of Grimm, Sally steering the one and Trompette, looking pert and unperturbed and architecturally still, at the tiller of the other. Billy had yet to appear. Eve was sitting cross-legged on the roof of the Number One looking at the view, which was open and undulating. Noah was leaning against her left knee, reminding her, via a small but insistent ache, that she had given up not just yoga but going to the gym. On the other hand, she never used to walk anywhere except along corridors and across car parks, and she’d been striding down towpaths for what felt like miles since the journey started. It was hardly surprising her joints and muscles were sending out distress signals.
The locks on this stretch of canal were wide enough to take both boats together. At the first lock, Eve scrambled onto the bank and emptied it, opened the gates, let the two boats in, filled it, opened the gates to let them out, closed the gates. There were two gates at each end, and though Anastasia had said it was possible to push open the opposite gate with a boat hook, she had advised against this until they were more surefooted. Instead, Eve had to jog from end to end, then cross the closed gates to reach the opposite side. Sally gave her encouraging smiles. Trompette didn’t.
At the second lock, Sally did the work. She raised the paddles to fill the lock, first on one side, then on the other. She leaned against the last one, preparing to let them down again, carefully, as Anastasia had directed.
“You need the key to turn the shaft so the sneck releases. If you let go, the paddle will drop and the key will spin round and fly off and cripple you. I don’t want cripples in charge of my boat. So hold the key and turn it until the paddle is down.”
As the Number One and Grimm sank down with the falling water, Sally became aware of a drumming sound. She leaned in closer to see if it was rising up from the mechanism working the lock, then looked round to see if it was the wind snapping a taut wire or a branch beating on a roof.
Dum Dumdedumdedumde. Dum. Dum. Dum Dumdedumdedumde.
Trompette was standing with the throttle in her hand ready to move forward once the lock was full and the gate open. As she guided Grimm out, the drumming increased and what seemed to be a lavatory brush rose from within the boat in time to its beat. All Sally could see was the tortured bristles of a wiry head of hair and the flash of white hands paddling the taut skin of a conical drum. The figure moved from the stern to the roof in easy, feline movements, settling himself in the same space among the debris that Trompette had occupied earlier.
“A boat which is the Number One,” he said, “and two women who are not Anastasia.”
“She’s in Uxbridge,” said Trompette.
“Uxbridge?”
“So they say.”
* * *
SALLY: Hello?
ANASTASIA: You’re shouting.
SALLY: Sorry. I was ringing to see how you got on at the hospital yesterday.
ANASTASIA: I went. I waited. I was talked at, very seriously, came home again and thought about what had been said.
SALLY: What did you think?
ANASTASIA: I thought it would be helpful if I considered my body as a fridge.
SALLY: A fridge?
ANASTASIA: Exactly. In a fridge, unwanted deposits build up. Mold, ice crystals, puddles of water, that kind of thing. The fridge keeps on doing what it does only too exuberantly, or not exuberantly enough. Now, if I owned such a fridge, I would get in there with the scraper and the bleach and the sponge and I’d chip and swab and mop. Then I’d see if I could work out what caused the problem, and fix it.
SALLY: I’m following.
ANASTASIA: What I wouldn’t do, is throw the thing away. If I couldn’t fix the problem and it happened again, I’d scrape and swab and mop again. And again. And finally, I would decide the fridge was no longer a fit thing to take up space in my boat and I’d throw it out.
SALLY: Yes. I see that.
ANASTASIA: So, I made up my mind to let the professionals scrape and swab and mop and try and fix the problem rather than throwing myself away at the first sign of a malfunction.
SALLY: Do they think they can?
ANASTASIA: How should I know?
SALLY: What do they say?
ANASTASIA: What they say is blather. It’s what they don’t say that is relevant.
SALLY: Right. What didn’t they say?
ANASTASIA: They didn’t say I’d live for years, but then again they didn’t say I’d be dead in six months.
SALLY: Well, that’s hopeful.
ANASTASIA: No it isn’t. The only reason not to give me the first piece of information is because it is unlikely to turn out to be true. There are numerous reasons why they might not have mentioned the second piece of information, of which the possibility of it not being true is only one.
SALLY: No, but had it definitely been true, I suspect they would definitely have said it.
ANASTASIA: I try not to indulge in naïve optimism. And the Number One?
SALLY: What? Oh! Everything’s great. We’re writing down everything in the logs, the maintenance, the distance, the top-ups, that kind of thing. And we’ve got a chart, just so you don’t think we’re not telling you everything. So far, Eve is ahead, or behind, if you see what I mean. She’s bumped the front going into three locks and under one bridge and I’ve hit the front four times and the side twice. We carry out an inspection every night when we stop and, so far, we don’t seem to have caused much damage.
ANASTASIA: Good.
End of call.
SALLY: Anastasia? Did you ring off?
ANASTASIA: You’d told me what I wanted to know.
SALLY: Yes, but you hadn’t told me everything I wanted to know. Any news on when they might be planning an operation?
ANASTASIA: No. And if there was, I wouldn’t tell you.
SALLY: Why not?
ANASTASIA: Cards, flowers, visits, bunches of grapes.
SALLY: If we promise to do n
one of that?
ANASTASIA: I’ll know in the next few weeks.
SALLY: Easy!
ANASTASIA: Easy!
* * *
NOAH DISAPPEARED. OVER THE PRECEDING days, miles, locks and bridges, Eve had conceived a fancy that she had formed a relationship with Noah capable of being described as ownership. The dog, she thought, clove to her. The word had cropped up in a Scrabble game the night before. Eve had found a place to put it and had contemplated it smugly while Sally thought about her move, recognizing its neatness (so much more satisfying and less messy than “cleave”) and aptness to the warm weight of fur and limbs even then asleep on her foot. Then Sally put down “astonish,” with an “s” at the end of “clove,” scoring 82 points and completely destroying the symmetry of the moment.
Noah slept in Eve’s cabin, looked earnestly and hopefully into her face when it was time for him to be fed. Further, and more tellingly, he had been known to come when she called him. Sally, he ignored. This notion of a relationship, of some piece of flesh made warm by circulating blood to which she was emotionally necessary, had cheered Eve every morning as she opened her eyes on the whiskered face tilted to one side, and each night as she fell asleep to the sound of the whiffling snores coming from the floor beside her. When they met Trompette, Noah’s performance with the maiden in distress had been as cruel a shock as the time when, as a teenager, she had assumed a boy she fancied was asking her to dance at a friend’s party when in fact he was only holding out a hand to take her dirty plate away from her. How easily, she bitterly reflected, was she lulled into complacency.
But despite this, he was hers, and she was his. And as they were eating lunch, it came to Eve that he had gone. She had made lunch. She had always tried to minimize the time she spent in the kitchen, in her previous life, but had found she was beginning to enjoy preparing such simple dishes as were within her capability, in the orderly, constrained space of the Number One’s kitchen. So she was distracted over making an effort, and did not notice he was not there until the food was on the plates and they had begun to eat. Whatever was on the table, Noah would be a constant, uncritical observer, chin on paws and eyebrows raised one after the other as his eyes swiveled from plate to plate. And now here he was, absent.
“Where’s Noah?” she said.
“As if I would know,” said Sally. “Or care.” She sniffed the air. “It still smells as if there is a dog on the boat, but that doesn’t mean there is.”
Eve went up onto the towpath and began to call the dog. They were moored with other boats, most of them occupied, and her cries of “No-ah, No-ah”—with the emphasis despairingly on the first syllable—mingled with the sound of music and chat and laughter. She stuck her head through the hatch of the Number One.
“I don’t expect you remember when you saw him last?”
“About an hour ago,” said Sally.
“I’m going to look for him.”
“You know that’s a waste of time!” Sally shouted after her. “Anastasia told us: he’ll come back.”
“I know,” called Eve. “But I’m going to look for him anyway.”
She walked back the way they had come, past other boats, under a bridge, over a lock, out into the featureless miles of overhanging trees and open pasture. She counted her steps and called his name every hundred paces. She passed a pair of lovers welded together in the shadow of a leaning chestnut. She overtook a solitary man then a solitary woman who might have set out together but were now resolutely apart. Two bicycles, wobbling onto the uneven grass to avoid her, then a jogger came past in the opposite direction. She diverted round a mother, toddler and buggy feeding an inharmonious gathering of ducks. For a long while she saw no one. A heron lifted slowly from the water’s edge ahead of her as if it resented the need to move for her convenience. Spirals of tiny flying insects drifted along the surface of the canal. In the distance, the sound of a helicopter became audible, then louder, then dipped away.
“No-ah! No-ah!” shouted Eve. But he hardly ever came to her calls. He was a dog who made eye contact. If he wanted her to do something for him, if she wanted him to do something for her, they would catch each other’s eye.
A piece of hawthorn twig became caught in her sandal and she stopped to remove it. She had no idea how far she had walked, but nearly an hour had passed since she’d left the boat. It seemed, simultaneously, impossible that she would ever find the dog, and almost certain that he would be around the next bend. She licked her finger and wiped away the smear of blood from the scratch inflicted on her by the twig, and kept walking.
“No-ah! No-ah!”
She passed two more bridges and started down a straight stretch with a lock in the distance. There was a dog running toward her, but it was the wrong dog. It bounded past her, all yellow and hairy. The owner came up. He was old, gray and bent, a slow-moving, crooked figure wearing a hat with a brim, a suit and tie and polished lace-up shoes. For a brief moment, Eve forgot about Noah as she tried to imagine what would lead a man to choose such clothes to walk his dog along a canal towpath. As she wondered, the dog barked, and another answered it.
The bank on the other side of the canal was steep and covered in scrub, and there, right on the edge, where the ground gave way to water, was Noah. He was almost vertical, with his front paws dug into the mud and his back end up in the air, but his tail was wagging and he looked ready for anything.
“Noah, Noah!” shouted Eve, the emphasis falling on the second syllable. The other dog owner stopped beside her.
“Can he swim?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” said Eve, struggling to release her phone from the pocket of her jeans. “Stay there, Noah,” she commanded. “Stay there.”
“His options would seem to be limited,” said the man, who clearly had a dog too pernickety to risk the undergrowth.
Eve dialed the number of her flat. When the receiver was picked up, she said: “Can Noah swim?”
“All dogs can swim,” said Anastasia.
“Is that a ‘yes’?”
“All dogs can swim,” repeated Anastasia, “but not all dogs do swim.”
“And is Noah a dog that can and does, or a dog that can but doesn’t?”
“I’ve never seen him do it.”
“He’s on the wrong side of the canal in the middle of nowhere and I don’t know how to get him back.”
“Tch, tch,” said Anastasia. (Eve later tried to reproduce this sound for Sally, but it was unrepeatable.) “What did I tell you the first time we met? The dog will always come back.”
The other dog began to bark at a jogger in the distance.
“Silas!” shouted his owner, with the emphasis on the last syllable.
Noah was still in the same position, alternately barking and wagging his tail. Eve squatted down on the very edge of the path. She was not a natural squatter and the position was hard to hold but it made her feel closer to Noah, even if forty feet apart in the horizontal plane. Also climbing into the opaque brown water remained a possibility, and it appeared more achievable when she was this close.
“Noah, Noah,” she whispered. Noah wagged his tail. Then the weight of Silas, who clearly thought she was at his level to play with him, being a dog of no brain, fell against her and pitched her sideways. She put an elbow out to break her fall but it missed the edge of the towpath and she momentarily felt herself to be rolling toward the water. She corrected the movement at the expense of all dignity and sprawled, face down, with her legs splayed out and her hands grasping at tufts of grass. Something that felt and smelled like a very wet dog started nuzzling and bumping her. As she tried to push it away she caught sight of a leg on the edge of her vision and it was white, not yellow; short, not long. Not Silas; Noah.
She rolled over and let the dog jump on her, all four, wet and slimy legs and the wet and slimy tongue and the dog’s breath of him on her chest and her face. She folded her arms around the dripping bundle and hugged.
�
�Are you all right?” asked Silas’s owner. “Do you need any help?”
He didn’t look a robust enough figure to supply any help, had she needed it, so she shook her head, rolled over and sat up. Then she began to cry.
“Steady on,” said the man.
“How ridiculous is this?” sobbed Eve. “I haven’t cried in public since I was eight, when Miss Clutterbuck told me to pull my socks up in assembly and I thought she meant it literally, so I did.”
“I don’t have a hanky. Or a Kleenex.”
“No need. I have a T-shirt.” She wiped her face on it.
He walked back with her toward the Number One, Noah skipping along ahead of them as if he was the sort of dog accustomed to orderly strolls after dinner, and Silas lagging behind to examine every blade of grass.
“Did you really do that?” asked the man.
“Do what?”
“Pull your socks up?”
“I did. They were only little white ankle socks, so I couldn’t pull them up very far. Everyone laughed.”
“Everyone?”
“It’s true. The teachers, the other children, the caretaker. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bust of the founder wasn’t having a quiet snigger.”
Noah looked back at the sound of their laughter, then shook his ears and ran on.
“You know,” said the man, “when people leap into water to save a dog, and someone drowns, it is always the owner, never the dog.”
“I don’t think I would have drowned. Not in a canal. I can swim.”
“I don’t suppose you would. That’s not what I’m saying.”
“No, I see. The dog always comes back. That’s what Anastasia says.”
“I thought I might have recognized the dog. I will be turning round now, but do give my regards to Anastasia. Tell her you met Parnassus.”
“Is that your name?”
“No, it’s the name of the boat which I live in whenever I can escape from the carefulness of my daughters. They think I should be spending my retirement walking to and from the newsagent in my slippers.”
The Narrowboat Summer Page 6