“Are you alone on your boat?” asked Sally.
“Yes. For the moment. Not always, but mostly.”
“Do you want me to hang on and help you take it through the lock?”
“Oh, no!” The woman laughed. “I’m perfectly self-sufficient.”
* * *
WHEN THEY REACHED MILTON KEYNES, Eve caught a bus into town and bought a bike. Sally would not come with her. Eve was unsure why this was. Although she felt she knew Sally by this time and had grown fond of her, there were still moments when she detected frictions in the working of Sally’s machinery, a hesitation that could be a symptom of an imminent breakdown, or merely a bit of dirt which would pass through. Eve was not implicated in this malfunction, she believed, but she couldn’t see a way of running a diagnostic check and effecting a repair. It occurred to her now that there might be a problem with money.
The boat bills—fuel, pump-out, gas—were paid from a tin into which they each put an equal amount of money each week. The amount and the tin had been provided by Anastasia. They had procured their own tin and set their own limit for food money, adopting the same approach, but in this area of joint banking, Eve had begun to cheat. She found two things to be true and suspected a third—she ate more, she was more self-indulgent and, or so she believed, she had more money available to her. So when she went shopping she bought more than the tin paid for. Sally never mentioned this and Eve did not know if she chose not to or if she had not noticed.
On the matter of bikes, Eve felt able to say:
“I expect you think if you had the money you wouldn’t waste it on a bike.”
“I do have the money,” Sally said, “but spending it on a bike would be a complete waste as I never learned to ride one.”
The bike shop in Milton Keynes was enormous and completely full of bikes, on the floor, on shelves and hanging from the ceiling. The staff were all young, lean, busy and wearing T-shirts. The customers were indistinguishable from the staff, except that most of them had brought their bikes into the shop with them and were holding them lightly by the saddle or handlebars like mothers who had brought their toddlers to a clinic. Eve noticed that, although she stood out from the crowd by being older, fatter and unaccompanied by a bike, she appeared to be invisible.
She toured the stock. She had last bought a bike at the age of twelve when her purchasing decision had been based on color and basket type. Only a few of the bikes in the Milton Keynes shop had baskets. The bikes with baskets were in colors that were probably called Dawn Sky or Midnight or Lemon Candy. Eve looked at these first. They were cheap and simple in construction, as far as she could tell: the shop was dark. She lifted the Midnight one off its stand, wobbled under its weight, stepped backward and collided with an androgynous elf in Lycra shorts.
“Careful!” said the elf, feeling the drop handlebars on its racing bike as if they might have been bruised in the encounter.
This piece of blue scaffolding masquerading as a bike was not what Eve was looking for, but when she tried to restore it to its previous position the slot where the wheel had fitted moments before had clamped its teeth together and resisted her attempts to put it back. She wheeled it, weaving a path through the other bikes, to a desk where a man with muscles but no hair and a name-badge identifying him as Clyde was just finishing a phone call.
“Do you want to buy that?” he said. His tone was so neutral it was loaded with the unspoken subtext: I can’t believe anyone would want a bike like that … but there again, now I come to look at you, I can believe you would want a bike like that and, frankly, it’s probably what you deserve.
“No,” said Eve. “It’s an overweight, under-engineered piece of crap. I don’t know anything about bikes, but even I can tell that much. I can tell you what I do want to buy, if you like.”
“Go ahead,” said Clyde, still not quite looking at her but allowing his focus to home in on the area she occupied.
“I want a bike that is relatively light, relatively easy to ride on the road but also capable of going along towpaths, is not going to break, costs less than a thousand pounds and is available for me to ride away today.”
“Ladies’ bike, is it?”
“What’s the advantage?”
“Easier to get on and off.”
“Disadvantage?”
“Either heavier, or less structurally rigid.”
“Not a ladies’ bike.”
Clyde looked straight at her and smiled. The light level, the muscles and the name had deceived her. He was no younger than she was. She smiled back.
An hour and a half later she was cycling down the wide, empty path beside a divided highway on a silver hybrid with eighteen gears and no basket. The first hour had been spent trying out the options on the stretch of path outside the bike shop. The last half hour had been spent fitting the accessories—panniers, lights, a sheepskin saddle cover—proposed by Clyde as essential to meet her specific needs. In the short time since the decision was made, her relationship with the bike had begun to grow and was now, after only a few hundred yards in the sunshine, as intense as any she had known. She lifted her feet from the pedals in an excess of joy, as she remembered having done on her first date at the age of fourteen when a boy called Theo had invited her to go with him to explore a disused flour mill. She felt as completely happy as she had been then.
She realized she had missed the road that led to the canal, braked abruptly and fell off. She landed on the soft, soft grass beside the empty path—oh, heaven that is Milton Keynes—but her bike fell onto the tarmac. She picked it up and felt its frame for dirt and scratches. They had both escaped unharmed. She cycled up to the Number One, ringing her bell. Sally put her head through the hatch.
“Look!” said Eve. She was still astride the bike; she had not yet worked out the best way to separate herself from it in the limited space, with the added hazards of ropes and bollards.
“Woman and bike as one,” said Sally. “Please tell me it hasn’t got a name.”
4
To Norton Junction
ANASTASIA: I’m going to come and visit you.
EVE: What? I mean, hello, Anastasia, that would be lovely.
ANASTASIA: Of course it won’t be lovely. It will be excruciating for all of us, but I can’t look at these walls any longer.
EVE: How will you get to us?
ANASTASIA: On a train. Jacob is going to organize it for me.
EVE: Jacob?
ANASTASIA: You must know your own neighbor.
EVE: Yes, naturally, I do. I just didn’t realize that you did.
ANASTASIA: I met him on the stairs. I’d paused for a rest and he thought I was some poor old sack and I thought he was a young man who would only be interested in buying, selling and taking drugs.
EVE: Well, he was wrong.
ANASTASIA: We both were. He’s been very helpful, him and his computer. I can go to London on the Tube and catch a train to Long Buckby and there is a bus to Long Buckby Wharf which is where you will meet me.
EVE: All right. When?
ANASTASIA: The day after tomorrow. Or possibly the day after that. Just be at the wharf when I get there.
EVE: Any idea what time of day?
ANASTASIA: No. Jacob knows all the train times, but I haven’t made up my mind which one to catch. So just wait for me.
EVE: We’ll be there.
ANASTASIA: If you’re not, I’ll sit by the wharf and make a nuisance of myself.
EVE: That sounds like a plan.
* * *
SALLY WAS IN CHARGE. THEY had been through the lock that marked the end of the model suburb that was Milton Keynes and then Eve had cycled ahead down the towpath, leaving her in sole possession of the Number One. It was three miles before the next lock and, until then, there was only the bass rumble of the engine; fields, hills, the sort of tufty white clouds children were supposed to draw (but rarely did, in Sally’s experience) in a blue sky.
Several boats passed by, headin
g in the opposite direction. A hire boat with what looked to be three generations of the one family, all zipped tight into orange buoyancy vests, talking at full volume in accents she could only place as being from somewhere to the north. An immaculate, privately owned boat with traditional decoration on the chimney, crewed by a couple wrapped in waterproofs as if they had no confidence in the brightness of the day, having been misled too many times in the past. A boat that looked lived in, lived on, with two sturdy brown women in the stern, looking relaxed. They raised their mugs to Sally as they passed, and she wondered whether she looked, to them, to be like them—in control and happy. Because she was.
She let her mind drift over the word that occurred to her, noticing the roof of this last boat. “Clutter.” An Anastasia word. In her Beech Grove existence, she would have thought “untidy,” not having the notion of there being too much of anything, only of things not being in their place. A strand of pink hair blew across her face and she stuck out her bottom lip, blew it away. There was something desperate about the pink hair and the ridiculous clothes, she now thought. She had needed to test her resolve on the bridge that led from Beech Grove to Chester, or wherever else she might be going. She had rushed too far; she didn’t need to be so crudely distant from the shore she had left.
She stood up, ready to throttle back as she approached a bridge and moored boats. “Thrupp,” said a sign on the wharf. Sally added this to “clutter” as another word she liked the taste of and would never have spoken, even to herself, before. When she reached Yardley Gobion (was she creating these names from the depths of her happiness, or had they always existed?) Eve was waiting for her. A bit red in the face, a bit damp and muddy.
“I hit a bump,” she said, climbing aboard as Sally slid the Number One into the side. “And fell off.”
“Are you all right?”
“Chipper. I bounce, or so it seems.”
* * *
They moored up, went to the pub and ordered fish and chips, then found a table in the garden. As they sat in the sun, occasionally batting a wasp away, Eve asked Sally what she was thinking about. It was a question Duncan had often asked and Sally had invariably answered with some triviality which had not been at the top of her mind at the time, but now she answered honestly.
“I was picturing my hand reaching up for a ceramic storage jar, pale green, pink rose pattern round the base and rim, labeled ‘Tea.’ Again, and again, and again. Then waiting for the kettle to boil, for the water to flow out of the kettle into the teapot. Waiting for it to be ready to pour, cool enough to drink. All these minutes of time not long enough to do anything else with, but cumulatively, a lifetime in which there is not time to do anything except wait.”
Eve said: “I filled every minute. If I went to fetch a coffee from the machine in the office I would take my phone with me and make a call on the way. If there was an agenda item in a meeting that was nothing to do with me, I would read the emails my PA printed off for me or a report I had to edit. Sometimes, I admit, I thought about things that had nothing to do with work. Whether to reorganize the furniture in my bedroom; whether to go with friends to the Algarve. But these things need thinking about, so it didn’t feel like a waste of time to be thinking about them.”
Sally said: “I have never had to go to many meetings, but whenever I did, I was always waiting for it to finish so I could go and get on with something else. Even though there was never very much I had to be getting on with.”
“What do you feel when you’re waiting for a lock to empty?” asked Eve.
“Ah, peaceful.”
“So do I.”
“We’re a pair, aren’t we?”
After a while, Eve said: “So what are you waiting for now? For the journey to be over?”
“No. I’m in a suspended state. I can’t tell you how restful that is.”
The food came and Noah lay on Eve’s foot, watching each forkful, shuffling to his feet whenever her finger and thumb closed on a chip, in expectation that her hand would travel not to her mouth but to his.
“Look at the dog,” Eve said. “He is faced with two irreconcilable alternatives and he’s too dumb to realize it. Oh, the innocence of dogs!” She lifted a chip and, keeping an eye on Noah, put it slowly into her mouth.
“What?” said Sally, who had been watching a toddler at a nearby table. The child was clutching her knickers and Sally was waiting to see if the mother would notice in time.
“Noah knows that you don’t like dogs and I do, so it makes sense to ignore your plate and put all his energy into watching mine. He thinks: this is my best shot at getting a chip.”
“That sounds about right.”
“Ah, but what he has failed to factor into his decision is that I’m greedy and you’re not. And if that is the case, you are the more likely source of leftover food.” She waggled her fork at Noah. “I am going to eat all of it,” she told him.
“Here,” said Sally, passing her plate over. “I’ve had enough. You can feed him some of mine.”
“Result!” whispered Eve in Noah’s ear, and flipped a chunk of fish and batter into his waiting jaws.
There was a flurry of activity at the toddler’s table, adults reaching for table napkins, mother whisking the wailing child off into the pub. Eve looked round.
“What’s happening over there?” she said.
“The little girl’s just wet her knickers,” Sally said.
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been waiting for it to happen.”
“I would never have noticed.”
“No, but I probably wouldn’t have noticed the dog was waiting for a chip.”
* * *
Eve put the bike back on the roof and retreated to the cabin to digest her lunch and marvel over the sensation of having undertaken strenuous exercise in the recent past. Sally carried on driving the Number One through the expansive landscape, watching the front wheel of Eve’s bike rotating slower and slower until it finally stopped and there was nothing moving on the boat, just the water curling away behind it and the scenery sliding past.
A long, straight stretch of canal gave Sally a view of a bridge in the far distance. The Guide told her a river (the Toye, another strong, plump word to add to “clutter,” “Thrupp” and “Yardley Gobion”) had joined the canal, and she was aware of a slight current, a little more resistance to the boat’s passage. She watched a heron lift off the bank and tuck its long legs up for a flight over the field; she nodded to a man wearing a hat, walking along the towpath, and he lifted the hat in acknowledgment. She wished she had a hat of her own to afford this courtesy to other passersby and fellow boaters. She mused over the origin of the word “boater” as applied to a hat, though this was not the sort of hat she had in mind. She wanted something soft, shapeless, drooping; the opposite, in fact, of a boater, but appropriate to the boater that she was. If Eve had been there, she could have shared this whimsical thought. But she might not have done.
She was smiling, in any case, as the once-distant bridge came closer and closer. There was a figure standing beside it, quite still, so at first she took it for a buttress. When it became clear it was a person, she thought “fisherman” and was not surprised it had not moved in all the time it took her to reach it. There was a series of locks beyond the bridge and Sally steered the Number One into the bank so she could rouse Eve and make a cup of tea before they started the climb. The man who had been so motionless now pushed himself off from the bridge and came along the towpath to where she was winding the center rope round a bollard to hold the boat steady against the bank. He was a smooth, slight man, with wispy hair and a small, neat beard. He was wearing rather old-fashioned clothes—a tweed jacket, wool trousers, gaiters—and he had a rucksack on his back. No fishing rod. He did not speak to Sally but walked along peering through the windows of the Number One.
“Where is Anastasia?”
“Not here, I’m afraid.”
He came right up to her, where she was
looping the spare rope out of harm’s way, and she saw he was older than she had thought. Though smooth, his skin looked brittle, spotted, worn.
“She’s not dead, is she?”
“No. She’s staying in Uxbridge and we’re taking the boat to Chester for her.”
“Why?” he said. He was standing too close.
“To have the bottom blacked or something like that.”
“No, why is Anastasia staying in Uxbridge?”
“Well…” He was making her uneasy. His eyes were rather bloodshot and she was catching the whiff of someone whose clothes and hair were not clean. He felt tense, too anxious for what her answer might be. As if telling him Anastasia was ill might push him over the edge into despair and she would be the one responsible.
The rear door of the Number One rattled open and Eve and Noah climbed out.
“Where are we?” said Eve.
“Bridge 55, Lock 20,” Sally said.
Noah stopped on the edge of the deck and put his head on one side to consider the man standing, still too close, beside Sally.
“Ho! Noah!” the man said.
Noah had a look around and sniffed the air then jumped down onto the towpath and advanced on the stranger in a subdued version of his normally ecstatic greeting of old friends. The man bent and scratched behind the dog’s ears. Noah rolled over and exposed his belly, which the man tickled. This ritual complete, Noah set off up the towpath like a dog with rats and rabbits on his mind.
“You were telling me,” the man said to Sally, “why Anastasia is in Uxbridge.”
The Narrowboat Summer Page 9