“You should stay with us for a few days,” she said. “You could tell us about all the trees we pass.”
He laughed. “You don’t need to know that,” he said.
* * *
Sally was up early, washing her sheets in the sink. The dog and Eve conspired to stop her sleeping—Mark had been given Eve’s bed, so Eve had moved into the other bunk in the rear cabin and Noah had come with her—and she detected an odor of dog on the pillowcase. It was almost a pleasure to know that Mark was leaving today, though she could not remember having enjoyed his company so much since he was a bundle without motive powers, snuggled against her chin.
“I’m thinking of buying a Kindle,” Sally said as soon as Eve appeared.
“What?”
“So I can read during the hours I have to spend in the dark listening to you and the dog snoring and grinding your teeth.”
“I knew I did that. I should have warned you.”
“And one of you farted. Often. Maybe both of you.”
“For a married woman, you’re very intolerant of other people’s sleeping habits.”
“Duncan was a good sleeper. Maybe I’d have left sooner if he hadn’t been.”
The morning was cooler; a breeze was shaking the sheets on the washing line, which was a piece of string strung between the tiller, through the holes in two, tall, hinged rods located on the roof and put into the upright position for the purpose, to a cleat on the front of the boat. This was Anastasia’s way of drying washing and her temporary crew were proud of it. None of the other boats had come up with a better way of solving the washing/drying problem; they festooned their craft and the towpath with any number of makeshift, unstable, unsightly and inefficient contrivances having loose ends and trailing parts. Or they cheated, by having an electric dryer for example, or using a laundrette, or tolerating very dirty clothes. Anastasia’s system was a masterpiece of countersunk screws, brass bolts, snecks. The sheets were held in place with pegs fashioned from pieces of metal; Eve described the process she guessed had been used to fabricate them, but Sally was not concentrating. Although she listened. Once or twice she had caught herself treating Eve’s voice like Duncan’s. Letting it saw through the air somewhere just out of reach. But mostly, it was no hardship to listen to Eve. Whatever she said was relevant to the confines of their new lives.
When she was not able to sleep, Sally drew the map of the boat in her mind, beginning at floor level, remembering every angle, every surface, every fixing. Moving up to knee level, to waist height, to head height. One night, she had to go and check the position of the flush in the toilet to prevent her brain snagging on its undiscoverability.
Mark was catching the bus. They examined Nicholson together, found the most convenient bus stop and spent the day moving at the Number One’s pace toward it. Mark took his turn at working the locks and driving the boat, but mostly he lay on the roof watching the banks slide past, or jogged down the towpath, disappearing from view and reappearing farther on, ready to step on board. Each time he materialized from the darkness under an arch it was a shock, but when he was on the Number One he fitted himself neatly around them. It was only as they were walking up the village street to the bus stop that Sally realized: if he had come to say something to her, it had not been said.
“You haven’t said anything,” she said, as they sat on a wall beside the post with its sparse information about the bus service, “about me leaving.”
“When I came,” Mark said, stamping on an empty crisp packet bowling past in the strengthening wind, then putting it in the bin attached to the post, “I meant to talk to you about it, but then I didn’t know where to start.”
“At the beginning.”
“Well. I was cross, you know? When you told me. Funnily enough, I felt as if it wasn’t fair on me. All my life I’ve had a mum and a dad who were married to each other, when lots of my friends didn’t, and I thought it wasn’t right you should suddenly turn me into someone from a broken home. That wasn’t who I was.”
“Oh, Mark!”
“I know, I know. I couldn’t help it, though. Then I thought I was being selfish and the one who had a right to feel cross was Dad. I couldn’t picture him in that house without you, so I went to see him, thinking he’d be in bits. And honestly, he wasn’t. He was more … bemused, like someone who’s spent the whole of his life waiting for the next episode of a soap opera on TV only to find it’s been axed. It was as if he was just waking up and looking round and wondering what had happened.”
“I can imagine.”
“And then Amy came round, full of outrage—I expect she had a go at you, too.”
“Oh yes.” Sally smiled at the thought of having this calm, considered conversation with her daughter. Amy had battered her with the words which came to her as she opened her mouth, and would have done again, she felt sure, if she had come to visit.
“But Dad didn’t really seem to join in. So I thought I’d better come and see for myself what was going on from your side before I worked out what I felt.”
“And what did you see was going on?”
“What you’re doing, it suits you. Not the hair, of course, that’s pretty gross. But the break, the way of life. So I’ve decided not to fret about it. Or about whether it’s an interlude or a definite change of direction. I’ll wait and see.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” said Sally.
* * *
EVE WAS LEANING ON THE post that supported the tap that was supplying water through a length of green hose to the tank on board the Number One. It was a hot day and she was wearing a pair of shorts she had bought the day before; another tipping point had been passed in the rebalancing of her life. She had weighed the importance of looking something less than comical against the need to be cool, unencumbered, accessible to sun and breeze. How she looked was a handful of dust when set against how she felt.
The sun was shining so brightly it was hard to look up without being blinded by the sharp and ever-shifting sparkles off the water, the polished surfaces on other boats, the white-painted lip of the wharf opposite, so Eve was studying her feet, and her absurd legs, and the line of the hose crossing the path in front of her. She was listening to the water falling into the tank and waiting for the note to change, which would mean it was nearly full and she could turn the tap off.
A commotion broke out to her left and she closed one eye as a precaution, squinted toward it with the other. A group of young men were approaching a hire boat moored farther down the bank. They were laden with drink; cans held together with plastic halters in their muscled, tattooed arms, and carrier bags hooked into the fingers of their broad hands. They were loud, and dazzling: the whiteness of their uncovered arms and legs, the sheen on their football shirts, the silver of the cans catching the sun as they struggled to carry their load onto the boat. Eve looked away, waited for the splash, wished she had bought a sun hat along with the shorts, a pair of sunglasses. She suspected she might have made up the muscles, and the tattoos, and perhaps even the drink.
At length, after further shouting but no splashes, the bank and the boat parted company and all the arms and legs and bottles and cans seemed to be aboard and the boat was traveling, or drifting, in Eve’s direction. The Number One’s water tank, unregarded, had filled and overflowed. Eve turned off the tap and disconnected the hose and was looking down, coiling it neatly in the shape of an ammonite, when the clamor of young men’s voices turned into recognizable sounds. Almost a whole sentence.
“Hello! Hello there, beautiful!”
Eve raised her head from the hose to see who they meant. They were looking in her direction and there was no one on the bank except her. She laughed. The men laughed back, calling and whistling and drinking and ignoring the progress of their boat, which was moving gently toward the wharf opposite. There was a jolt as it struck the concrete. Eve held her hand to her mouth in expectation that, this time, one of them would lose his hold and fall. None of them did. The two
or three perched on the narrow ledge running along the side of the boat each managed to hold on to the roof rail with one arm and keep one foot connected, windmilling their other arms and legs in a chaotic parody of the cover of the Beatles’ Help! album. Which Eve owned, or had done, though who knew what decisions Anastasia was even then taking about what was, or was not, necessary to an orderly existence.
The activity on the hire boat transferred to the far side. The crew, if they could be called such a thing, seemed to have concluded that this was a suitable destination and settled down to tackle the rest of the bottles and cans. Eve finished coiling the hose. She fetched a mop and swabbed up the spilled water. She went down into the cabin and straightened everything that was, however marginally, squint or crumpled. She drank a glass of water, slowly, standing at the side hatch watching two male mallards squabbling. She began a shopping list on the pad hanging up for the purpose.
Sun tan lotion
Sun hat
She thought about it for a while, considering what else she could possibly want, looked at her toes, wrote:
Nail varnish
Then crossed it out.
She took a book and went outside to the helmsman’s seat on the rear deck. From across the canal a renewed commotion indicated that the young men had wearied of their mooring, or had run out of beer, and were on the move again. They persuaded the boat into the middle of the canal and hung there, slack-mouthed and sleepy, then continued their progress toward Eve.
“Hello, beautiful,” said one, with a sorrowful note in his voice as though he had fought and lost and was bearing it with dignity. The rest backed him up with a few uncertain whistles.
The boat gathered speed, which might have been because the man holding the tiller intended it to or because his or someone else’s knee had nudged the throttle. The boy at the helm did not alter course but continued straight ahead toward the bank they had recently left, where a line of bushes and small trees overhung the canal. His crew became loud and incoherent as the first branches smacked them on the head, but it was too late to prevent the bow traveling, full tilt, into the undergrowth where the one young man at the front was completely lost from view. All the others began to laugh, wildly, and it seemed to Eve to be a number of minutes before anyone put the boat into reverse. As it slid backward, she waited for the empty space to be revealed where the body at the front had been, but there he still was, a compact ball covered in debris.
As the boat made steady progress toward the next bend, they all turned and waved. The one at the front, brushing himself off, lifted his head and shouted:
“I love you!”
“We all love you,” agreed the one at the back.
They left the surface of the canal spotted with twigs and leaves, floating among bubbles rising from the mud like so many fish eyes coming up to see what had happened that was so extraordinary.
* * *
It was a mystery to Sally how, one moment, it was necessary to take the boat up and up and up, then, rounding a bend, to find the next set of locks waiting to drop the Number One down and down and down to continue its journey. Water, after all, generally fell in one direction.
“It’s to do with the watershed,” Eve said. “The point where the rivers that feed the canals start running down to the sea.”
This didn’t sound too convincing—either the explanation or Eve’s way of delivering it—so Sally let it go and thought, instead, it was like the walks and cycle rides they used to go on when the children were small, because Duncan felt that was what families did together. He had been an only child of elderly parents and had grown up longing for what he believed was a normal family life. Sally had quite enjoyed these walks because they meant she was not doing any chores, and she had time to think. But it always felt like something they were doing because they ought to be doing it, rather than something they wanted to be doing. When Mark found their pace too slow for him and began finding his own way of exploring the countryside, the rest of the family let the practice lapse. But the thing Sally remembered most clearly was the sinking feeling as she approached a hill, whether going up or down, because, even if it was down, it would be up on the way back. So it was on the canal, only there was no more effort involved in going into an empty lock and rising to the top than in going into a full one and dropping down to the bottom.
Later she noticed Eve reading one of Anastasia’s books on the construction of the canals, and it did not surprise her when Eve admitted that she had been wrong about the watershed. Canals, it seemed, like footpaths, went up to a summit and then down again, and provision of water was just one of the problems to be tackled by the early canal builders, which they had come up with so many inventive ways of overcoming.
* * *
EVE: Hello?
ANASTASIA: Where are you?
EVE: Oh. Bridge 126.
ANASTASIA: What have you been doing?
EVE: We’ve been going carefully. You wouldn’t want us to behave recklessly, now, would you?
ANASTASIA: There’s reckless and there’s cautious and I want you to be on the cautious side of reckless. But then there’s idle and there’s active and I’d expect you to make at least a small effort to get over the line and be halfway toward active.
EVE: You’re barking at me.
ANASTASIA: Well?
EVE: Oh, well. I would say we have moved off cautious and are working our way to the midpoint between that and reckless.
ANASTASIA: Which you should never cross.
EVE: Which, I promise you, we will never cross. And it honestly doesn’t feel as if we’ve been idle. We’ve had a visitor.
ANASTASIA: Who?
EVE: Sally’s son.
ANASTASIA: She’s not being seduced back, is she?
EVE: No. He didn’t try, and even if he had, she wouldn’t have listened. I’ll prove it. Sally! Anastasia’s worried Mark might have tried to change your mind about the trip.
SALLY (faintly): Impossible.
ANASTASIA: Good.
EVE: Also, we met some friends of yours.
ANASTASIA: Now I’m worried. Friends? What friends? Ludicrously overused word, “friends.”
EVE: I know, you’re right. We met some people who know you.
ANASTASIA: Of course you did. Most people who live on the canal know me. Boat?
EVE: Grimm.
ANASTASIA: Number of people on the boat?
EVE: Two.
ANASTASIA: It’s time Trompette walked away.
EVE: Funnily enough, Sally thinks the same.
ANASTASIA: What’s funny about that?
EVE: Nothing, nothing. How are you?
ANASTASIA: Still possibly dying.
EVE: Of course, but otherwise?
ANASTASIA: Not dead yet.
EVE: Good.
ANASTASIA: Easy.
* * *
SALLY TRUDGED UP TO THE next lock, swinging the key in her hand, watching where she put her feet because it had rained and she was wearing sneakers that were not waterproof. When she reached the lock, there were two boats in it, coming up, and several people waiting to open the gates, or just hanging about. Sally went up to a woman leaning against a gate beam.
“I can open the gate,” she said, “if you want to get back on board.”
The woman shook her head.
“Neither of these is mine,” she said. “I’m waiting to come up.”
So Sally crossed over and repeated the offer to the man on the other gate, who accepted it. The two boats and their crews negotiated their way out of the lock and the Number One came in. When they had shut the gates, the woman said to Sally:
“Isn’t that Anastasia’s boat?”
“It is.”
“Is she on board?”
“No. She’s entrusted it to us to take up to Chester.”
As she spoke, it occurred to Sally how strange it was that Anastasia had trusted them in this way. The woman she was talking to was a decade younger than she was, she guessed,
and was wearing shorts with sturdy boots at the end of her long, muscular, tanned legs. She looked so thoroughly competent. And yet—Sally looked down into the emptying lock where Eve stood, hand on the throttle, head turned to watch the distance from the lock gates—hadn’t they also begun to look as if they knew what they were doing? Anastasia’s instincts, she thought, might not have been wrong.
“You know,” the woman told her, “I owe it to Anastasia that I’m living the way I do.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. I took up boating because I had reached one of those ‘had-it-up-to-here’ moments. You know what I mean—wrong job, wrong partner, etcetera, etcetera. And I happened to be living on the canal at the time because I couldn’t afford a house, so I just cast off and kept going. I loved it all summer, then winter came along. I was that close to giving up. I was fighting my way through the snow on the towpath with a can to fetch water because I was frozen in and couldn’t move the boat to the tap, and I was thinking I would never, ever be warm again. And I met Anastasia with her dog. I told her I was fed up of being cold and I was thinking of going back to where I could have a hot bath and go to sleep with the central heating on, and she ignored what I’d said and asked me to tell her what I could hear. Right at that moment. So I listened for a bit and I could hear the ice creaking on the canal and Anastasia’s dog snuffling and far, far away, the hum of traffic. Then she asked me what I could see. This was on the Kennet and Avon Canal and it was flat but such gentle countryside, huge sky, every tree covered in frost and lit up by the sun. It was so beautiful. Anastasia said I had to work out which I wanted to have as normal and which as an occasional treat—the silence and the beauty, or the hot bath and the warm room. That was five years ago, and here I still am. Never regretted the decision. Or not often.”
The Narrowboat Summer Page 8