“She’s just having a few tests,” said Sally.
“And we’re having a holiday,” said Eve, stepping off the boat onto the towpath. “Who are you? We’ll have to let her know we’ve met you.”
“Well, well, well,” said the man with something close to a giggle, all anxiety gone and a sort of pixie-like charm replacing it. “She’s indestructible, Anastasia, wouldn’t you say? In-des-truct-ible. I pity the poor doctors, indeed I do. Now, my name is Arthur and I’m hoping you two ladies will give me a lift.”
“A lift?” said Eve. “Where to?”
“Norton Junction.”
“We’re meeting Anastasia at Norton Junction in a couple of days,” said Sally.
“Are you?” said Arthur. “Champion, champion. I’ll work the locks, of course. To pay for my passage, as it were.”
“We only travel at walking pace,” Eve said, “never mind the locks. Wouldn’t it be quicker to walk?”
“Oh, but I’m an old man, my dear. The legs, you know, the legs and the poor ruined feet. They do long for a rest.”
“Are you asking us if you can sleep on the boat?” asked Sally. She sounded shrill, but she was unsure if Eve had detected the odor the man was carrying about with him; although she knew, from experience in the classroom, that she would cease to notice it after a while, she was not keen to go through the time until this state was reached. Also, she did not want him on the boat. Or anywhere near the boat. And she thought this was small-minded of her, and this in turn was making her irritable and miserable.
“No, no,” Arthur said. “You young ladies need your privacy. I’ve a tent here in my rucksack. But a bit of hospitality, now, that wouldn’t go amiss. A shared crust, a brew. What do you say?”
“What would Anastasia say?” asked Eve, which was the question Sally had been pondering. But it wasn’t a question that troubled Arthur. He laughed and moved his feet in what might have been, Sally thought, a caper, though she had never been sure what that was.
“She wouldn’t say anything, my lovely ladies, she’d nod, and I’d nod, and there we’d be, as we have been year on year since you two had pigtails and gingham frocks. Sharing the work; lightening each other’s loads. We have a history, Anastasia and me. Now”—he detached his rucksack and heaved it onto the rear deck—“if the water’s hot, I could do with a shower before I set to with the windlass on this next set of locks. And I’ll put the kettle on as I go past, shall I?” And he was gone, leaving Eve and Sally standing on the bank looking at the spot where he had recently stood.
“What do you think?” asked Eve.
“He smells. Had you noticed?” They were both whispering because, though he was unlikely to hear them from inside the boat, Arthur gave the impression of a man who would catch you out, if you let your guard down. Eve shook her head.
“The shower is a good idea, then, is it?”
“It is.”
“Do you think we should phone Anastasia?” Eve asked, then instantly shook her head. “No, probably not.”
* * *
Arthur came out of the shower looking smoother and pinker and wearing clothes no less old-fashioned but more casual: a pair of fawn trousers and a white shirt. He smelled of Sally’s lemon soap but his clothes had a metallic, chemical old-man-and-musty-wardrobe tang. Though his odor was no longer actually offensive, Sally still found him repellent. He looked even more slippery, even more likely to leave the boat by one door and reappear, without a sound and when least expected, at the other. He was fluid; though his movements were jerky he appeared to transpose himself from a position, upright, to a position, seated, by some trick. Sally went back over the moments it had taken him to go from being a complete stranger to a member of the crew, drinking tea with them, to work out whether there had been anything she could have done to stop this happening. There wasn’t. He had asked for a lift and she could have said “no,” but she was sure this would have made no difference to the outcome.
Eve was clearly interested in him. She wanted to know where he came from and where he was going, but he waved these questions aside.
“Later, ladies, later. We should get going up the locks and delay the chat until such time as the work is over.”
He was off the boat and up at the first lock with a windlass at the ready before Sally had the cups stacked in the sink.
“He does skip about,” she said.
“He could be useful,” said Eve. “Shall I take over driving?”
Before—before Arthur—whichever one of them had been working the locks had covered quite a distance. And this time there was a boat ahead of them but none coming the other way, so they had to empty each lock before the Number One went in. But if the work was less, with Arthur scampering back and forth on the other side, the fact of his presence, of his scampering, made stressful what was normally a pleasant, undemanding task. When Arthur hopped back on board for the short journey to the second lock, Sally called out to Eve that she would walk. She reached it before they did, and hung over the gate, waiting for the lock chamber to empty, and watched the Number One approach, Eve at the tiller and Arthur, a stick-like figure glued on to the gunwale, holding the rail with one hand.
They worked five of the locks this way, a major road crossing between two of them reminding Sally of the hurry to move forward she had left behind. After the last of the five, there was a stretch to the outskirts of Stoke Bruerne and the next lock. Sally climbed aboard the Number One and said to Eve:
“We’ll moor in Stoke Bruerne, shall we?”
“I thought so,” Eve said.
Arthur, perched on the gunwale still, said: “There’s nowhere to pitch a tent in the village.”
Sally was standing with her back to him. Eve, at the tiller, was facing him.
“Well…” Eve began, then caught Sally’s eye. If Sally had shaken her head, Arthur would have detected the movement, so she mouthed the word “NO” instead. “We’d better wait until we’ve gone through it, then,” Eve said.
“There’s nowhere between the village and the entrance to Blisworth Tunnel.”
“Before?”
“Just here will do.”
* * *
EVE WAS FASCINATED BY ARTHUR. She was used to being in rooms full of men and confident of being able to categorize them in an instant by their dominant characteristics and then, after a brief acquaintance, by the subsets, those details of attitudes, values, interests that went to make up an individual. She rarely found herself, after lengthy or even intimate knowledge of a person, to have been mistaken in her first assessment. Occasionally, someone who presented as arrogant, patronizing and misogynistic had later revealed all his uncertainties and lack of self-esteem in ways both direct and indirect. But even after such revelations, and after she and they knew she had been told and had retained a memory of the person this person truly was, even then, the dominant behavior was the same as before. So, to all practical purposes, she was right.
But Arthur eluded her. It was not just that he shape-shifted from one moment to another, appearing sturdy and feeble, strong and weak, old and in the prime of his life, in the time it took to respond to his last remark or turn back to him from looking away; or that he moved as rapidly from appearing needy to appearing to be in control, from being tragic to being childishly happy. At no point did he begin to conform to any of the types she had met before.
She would have liked to discuss all this with Sally, but at first it didn’t seem possible. Arthur was so present, even when absent. But when he was setting up his little tent under the hedge beside the towpath, she asked Sally what she thought of him.
“He makes me uneasy,” Sally said. “I don’t know why, so don’t ask me.”
Eve thought this was as abrupt as Sally had been since they started out.
“I can see why he would,” she said. “He never seems the same, one moment to the next. But he’s harmless, surely?”
“Probably,” said Sally. “I don’t feel as if I want to touch him,
or be alone with him. I have no idea what he might say or do next.”
Eve felt this was rather unsatisfactory. It worried her, as it turned out she felt responsible for Sally’s well-being, for keeping her moving forward away from 42 Beech Grove. She turned away. Sally touched her arm.
“And actually, I’d rather it was just you and me on this boat,” Sally said. “That suits me.”
“It’s only for a day or two,” Eve said, but she was absurdly pleased by this remark.
It was Sally’s turn to cook and she walked into the village to buy more sausages, as sausages were what she had planned and there were not enough for three. Eve offered to go on the bike. Sally said no. Arthur offered to go but Eve could see he didn’t mean it, was not even trying very hard to look as if he meant it. So Sally went. After a few steps she stopped and came back.
“You’re not a vegetarian, a vegan, kosher, halal, on a gluten-free diet or allergic to some everyday ingredient, are you?” she asked Arthur.
“No,” he said, looking meek. “None of the above.”
Having set his tent up, Arthur produced a harmonica from his rucksack and sat cross-legged on the roof of the Number One playing tunes that were fast, then slow, that dipped and dived as Arthur himself did, but that sounded to Eve like the right soundtrack for the day, for the place. She had the technology to play any of the music on her phone, and had imagined they would drift down the canals to the sound of Bach or Beethoven, move round the cabin cooking with a bit of Alanis Morrissette, settle down in the twilight to listen to something slow and mellow from Kate Bush or Simon and Garfunkel. In fact, they never had. It had never felt appropriate to drown out the sounds of the canal, all the whispers, gurgles, whistles, rustles, cries and songs of the water and the wildlife and the fringe of vegetation. But the folksy, harmonious, unfamiliar tunes that Arthur was playing, they were a fitting accompaniment to the canal’s music.
Then he began to sing. Folk songs that told stories. These had always confused Eve because she never knew whether she was supposed to be captivated by the story or by the music and the voice, and she never seemed to have the capacity to appreciate both. Arthur had a lovely voice, though, so she concentrated on that; concentrated so hard she was startled by a round of applause from a group of young people passing by on a hire boat she had not heard approaching. Arthur gave a victory trill on the harmonica and bowed extravagantly. Then he started another, slower, sadder song and all the sadness and pathos of it seeped into his face, his stance, his very way of being.
Sally came back and started making a noise with the pans in the kitchen, so Eve went outside and joined Arthur on the roof.
“You don’t live in a tent on the towpath, do you?” she said. “You must have a home.”
“I do, I do. It’s in Uttoxeter.”
“That’s one of those places I could never pinpoint on a map,” said Eve, thinking it was the sort of place she’d expect Arthur to live. Not easily summed up.
“I know where it is,” said Arthur. “No need for you to know as well.”
“You haven’t walked from Uttoxeter, though, have you?”
“Now,” said Arthur, holding up a finger. “Stop with the little, creeping questions. Ask me what you want to know.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Good, good. I’m escaping. What are you doing here?”
“I’m escaping, too.”
“As I thought. Tell me what you are escaping from.”
Eve noted the imperative replacing the interrogatives she had used and determined to copy this when her turn came.
“I’ve been sacked. So I have to decide what to do now, and I find I’ve forgotten how to make that sort of decision. So I suppose you could say I’m escaping from the future. Tell me what you’re escaping from.”
“Killjoy and Snubbit. They employ me as an accountant, and Killjoy, Snubbit and all their employees, clients, the figures they generate and the boxes I slot them into are bearable only for so long. How long? you are going to ask. I can’t tell you. It varies. Less than a year, more than three months, as a rule.”
“That can’t be their names.”
Arthur swiveled from his hips and looked at her and she felt she had wasted a question, as she had a feeling the number of questions he would answer was finite, and she would not know what the final number was until he told her she had used them all up. So she said: “I don’t have any previous experience of canals as an escape route.”
Arthur appeared to do a little jig on the spot, though he remained sitting down.
“The best, my dear, the very best. The calm of them, always and never changing.”
“Only as an escape, though,” Eve said. “Not a way of life.”
“If I had no job,” he said, “and no responsibility for anyone but myself, I would want to stop escaping and start living.”
“On the canal?” said Eve, confused into another question.
Arthur, when she glanced across at him, was wearing his most tender, his most melancholy, his most serious expression.
“A canal is nothing but a man-made watercourse,” he said. “A miracle of engineering created to make or maintain wealth.”
“So not the answer?”
“That depends on what the question is. There can’t be an answer until you’ve defined the question.”
Eve was relieved when Sally stuck her head through the hatch to tell them supper was ready.
“That was quick,” said Arthur, suddenly looking and sounding like a skinny old man who wanted to be looked after.
* * *
They ate the meal in an awkward silence. Sally and Eve had fallen into the habit of having a book or a newspaper or a crossword or Sudoku puzzle to hand at mealtimes, but they only turned to these amusements when they had discussed the food and, if that sparked any topics of more enduring interest, only when these had been exhausted. With Arthur there, it seemed rude to line up a diversion which would look as if they were planning to avoid talking to him, but Eve could think of nothing at all spontaneous to say about sausage, peas and mash, so said nothing. Sally, who was normally happy to start the conversation by mocking her own culinary efforts, also said nothing. And Arthur, as if no food had passed his lips for at least a fortnight, could only have spoken if he had been prepared to do so with his mouth full. Eve tried to catch Sally’s eye, but she kept her head down.
After the last sausage had been eaten (by Arthur), Sally looked at him and said: “Pancakes?”
Arthur’s slippery face formed itself into a smile that was clear, uncomplicated, utterly charming, and Sally smiled back—how could she not?—and began making batter. Eve cleared the dishes into the bowl in the sink and sat down again. They had reached an agreement, early on, that when one person was standing up and moving about, the other should sit still. Eve had pointed out that this was the sensible approach; she was happy to relax into idleness and watch Sally work when it was Sally’s turn to be working. Sally had had to be reminded at first that no one would judge her if she did not wash up at once, or sweep the crumbs from the table as soon as the meal was done. Eve had observed the transition from rigid compliance to cheerful acceptance and had chalked it up as another step in the unwinding the trip was achieving.
As Sally whisked the eggs in a bowl, Arthur began to feel about in the storage cavity below the bench she had been sitting on. He took out all the games—Scrabble, Cluedo, chess, two packs of cards, Monopoly and Uno.
“Now, then,” he said. “Which of these do you two ladies play?”
“Not until after the pancakes,” said Sally, sounding just like Eve’s mother. “You’ll make them sticky.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” said Arthur. “Stickiness. I should think not. What would Anastasia say?” He turned to Eve and dropped his voice. “She is all right, isn’t she? She is coming back to the Number One?”
“I told you,” Eve said. “She’s meeting us the day after tomorrow at Norton Junction.”
“Yo
u did, of course. It’s an old man’s folly, to fear disaster.”
After the pancakes had been eaten, Sally and Eve did the washing-up, following their usual ritual. One washed, one sat and dried as the dishes were passed over. The one washing sat down and the one drying stood up and put everything away. It was like the callisthenic exercises Eve used to do during a secondment to Japan: simple, relaxing, purgative. After her return home, she had never done them again. She felt sure that, in the same way, if ever she re-entered her old life she would go back to a random processing of the tools for cooking and eating on the basis that there was always something else she could be doing. But in this space, with Sally as a partner, she liked the pattern they formed and the resulting tidiness was a constant source of pleasure.
While they cleared up, Arthur went out onto the towpath and rummaged around in his rucksack, accompanied by Noah, who had the air of a dog keeping an eye on Arthur, though whether in hope or fear it was impossible to tell. As soon as the last dish was put away, the last crumb swept up, Arthur re-materialized in the cabin, turned out to be sitting just where he had been before, with the games stacked at this elbow, looking from one to the other with his eyebrows raised.
“We play Scrabble,” Sally said.
“Are either of you any good?”
“We both are,” said Sally.
“As good as Anastasia?”
“Not quite. But we have been playing a lot, so we may have improved.”
Arthur put the tips of his skinny little fingers together.
“The thing we must get straight,” he said, “before we begin, is our several attitudes to winning and losing. Only once we know this can we choose the right game to play. The game that will preserve, you understand, harmony.”
“Doesn’t everyone have the same attitude?” said Sally. “Everyone wants to win, no one wants to lose.”
“That is like saying everyone wants to live, no one wants to die, and assuming that, in stating so much, you have penetrated to the very heart of an individual’s approach to life and to death.”
The Narrowboat Summer Page 10