“Let’s start with you, then,” Eve said. “What is your attitude, Arthur, to winning and losing?”
“Too fast, young madam, too fast. I think we need to define our parameters, understand what it is we mean when we talk about how we feel in the matter of winning, or of not winning.”
“Sounds good,” said Eve, who liked definitions and parameters.
“We don’t keep the lights on after ten o’clock,” said Sally, “to avoid draining the battery.”
“Right! Right! Let me transport you, then, to the moment a game is over. Now, imagine you did not enjoy the game, because it was too long or too confusing, or you had cramp and no room to move your foot to get rid of it, or you were worried about whether the cake you had left in the oven was burning or whether someone else around the table might be about to be sick, or you hated one or all of the other players to the point of distraction. It doesn’t matter why. If you won, would that cast a retrospective light on the experience that transformed it into something worthwhile? Something you later reminded your fellow players about with a happy nostalgia: ‘Do you remember when we played Monopoly for eight hours and could barely move at the end?’ and they would all groan, but for you, it is a memory worth preserving, rose-tinted, because of your victory.”
Eve started to speak but Arthur held up a hand to stop her. “No, wait. Hold that person, who might or might not be you, in your mind, and consider now a game that has passed as enjoyably as you could have hoped. Laughter, teasing, plenty of swift action. But you lost. Do you care? Do you make a mental note to suggest a different game next time, one you believe gives you a better chance of winning? Or do you think, ‘Never mind, it was fun.’”
“I’m the first type,” Eve said. “I admit it. Whether I enjoyed myself or not. I’m really only playing to win. But without, hopefully, the post-victory gloating. I don’t think I do that.”
“You do a bit,” Sally said. “But you still enjoy the game, whether you win or lose, don’t you?”
“Up to a point. What about you? You don’t care much, one way or another, do you?”
“I don’t care about winning,” Sally said. “But I hate to come last, or, if there are only two players, to be too far behind whoever wins … We’re talking here,” she said, turning to Arthur, “of a game involving some level of skill, aren’t we? No one minds losing at Snakes and Ladders because they never threw a six to start.”
“I mind,” said Arthur. “Good game, boring game, hard game or simple game, outcome a lottery or outcome a result of skill, tactics, cunning moves and blocking maneuvers. I want to win.”
That surprises me, thought Eve. Then she thought how ridiculous to think that when everything about this man surprised her.
Sally and Arthur remained looking at each other, as if a challenge had been laid down and each was waiting for the other to respond to it.
“How about,” Eve said, “you teach us a game we haven’t played before. Then you are sure to win and we won’t mind losing because we were always going to.”
“Can you play cribbage?” said Arthur.
Neither of them could, but some way through the explanation of how the game worked, Sally declared that not only could she not play cribbage but it was unlikely she would ever want to play cribbage, and she climbed out of the Number One to take Noah for a turn along the towpath. Eve, however, was enthralled by it. She liked the simplicity of the game and the complexity of the scoring—which they had to do with paper and pencil, lacking the pegboard that, Arthur said, was one of the joys of playing it, often a work of art in itself as well as a visual presentation of relative positions. Eve became so involved that it was only with the dimming of the light that she realized it was late, that Sally should be back by now, that she was sitting inches away from a man she had met only a few hours ago and who she could not begin to understand and who was therefore capable of anything. She shifted away from him, instinctively.
“Battery-saving time,” she said. “I’ll have to say goodnight.”
Arthur swept up the cards they had been playing with. “You have the makings of a cribbage player,” he said.
“You mean I might one day become good enough for you to refuse to play me?”
Arthur made a noise between a snigger and a cough. “Not likely,” he said. “But you might be good enough to be worth beating, after a year or two.”
Eve went outside to look for Sally and found her sitting on a bollard, Noah at her feet.
“Lights-out time,” she said.
“I know,” said Sally. “That’s what I was waiting for.”
It was a still night and the mooring was remote from houses and roads so the rhythmic snoring of Arthur in his towpath tent was audible inside the Number One. Eve lay her head on the pillow in the expectation of being kept awake by the pattern of sounds from the bank, but the rules of cribbage running round in her head proved enough to send her to sleep despite it.
* * *
IT RAINED. A SOFT, MISTY drizzle that dampened the surfaces but appeared to be no inconvenience until it soaked through layers quicker than expected and made everything that needed to be touched in the process of moving a boat—the tiller, ropes, rails, lock keys—slick and slippery.
Sally stood by the open side hatch looking at the downy drops of moisture on Arthur’s zipped-up tent. She had made a pot of tea and wrapped a towel round it to keep it warm; now she was trying to decide whether to go over and leave a mug where Arthur could reach it from inside his cocoon. She could not understand what she felt about Arthur this damp, gray morning. He was like a violin, playing tunes that were never the same, in tone, in mood, in tunefulness, so it was impossible to know, before it came on stage, whether to dread or look forward to the sound it would make. As she stood there, with her mug of tea, she was inclined to feel sorry for him, in his tea-less, cramped and, for all she knew, not quite waterproof shelter. On the other hand, she was fearful of what would happen if she approached, if she called out and announced she was there. She had no idea what he would do, her imagination not reaching the end of the possibilities; it snagged on the idea he might emerge, in one movement, partially clothed or even naked, aggressive or, worse, too welcoming. He was, as she had said to Eve, so hard to pin down.
She lifted her mug to her lips and at that moment the zip on the tent slid upward and Arthur rolled out. He was wearing the same clothes as the night before and looked like a cat unfolding itself from the place it had chosen to sleep in. Sally was just thinking that there was nothing threatening about a waking cat (unless you happened to be small enough to be its prey) when Arthur appeared down the steps from the rear deck, shaking drops of water off his jacket.
“Tea?” she said.
“You are a lovely lady.”
“And breakfast?”
“Lovelier and lovelier.”
He seemed diminished this morning, a little, gray figure who stayed hunched over his mug while Eve and Sally did their morning tasks. He waited to use the bathroom until it would be no inconvenience to them; he scuttled over to his tent and collapsed it, so it seemed, in a single movement; having stowed everything in his rucksack, he came back on board and sat, hunched and silent, at the table until it was time to move.
There were two more locks to work before they were clear of Stoke Bruerne. Eve offered to do them without him, as she was wearing waterproofs.
“No, no,” he said. “I must earn my passage.”
They gave him what Anastasia had described as the emergency poncho. It was enormous and orange and not, she told them, suitable for prolonged use because the wearer of it had to be ever vigilant to avoid trapping the flapping fabric in any number of dangerous and damaging ways. It was not an emergency and it was not pouring with rain, but Arthur accepted the loan of this garment, scarcely smaller than his tent, and appeared unconcerned about looking ridiculous—which he did. Sally, at the tiller, was at liberty to observe passersby taking a second look. She found herself keeping a watchf
ul eye on him to make sure he heeded the advice, which he had treated with indifference, to make sure nothing snagged as he skipped from gate to paddle, from paddle to gate.
They reached Blisworth Tunnel. It was, said the book, 3,075 yards long; long enough for the light at the end to be visible only in the best conditions, from the right angle, in the right light. It was not obvious where the end lay, as the Number One approached its dark mouth. It was close to two miles, Sally thought, a walkable distance, a distance she regularly walked from 42 Beech Grove to the school where she worked. She tried to imagine the journey ahead as if it was the walk to school on a particularly dark morning when the street lights had been turned off. She listed for herself the markers that broke up that walk, the post box on the corner, the perfectly trimmed yew hedge halfway down the next street, the place where an old plane tree caused the pavement to narrow and the surface to ripple under her feet. But as she steered the bow of the Number One through the opening into the narrow space under the arched roof, she stopped thinking about getting to the end—of the imaginary walk, of the tunnel—and focused on the experience of being inside it, the only illumination the Number One’s headlight. Being anywhere else became unimaginable.
There was no towpath, just the arch of bricks spanning the inky, lapping water, smacking the sides as the Number One sucked it up and pushed it aside in its passage. Sally had thought, as she approached the tunnel’s mouth, that she should take off her waterproof, which would no longer be needed. But although there was no rain inside the arch, there were drips, random drips and occasional water spouts implying pressure from without, barely held in check.
What she should have done, she realized as the sparse daylight faded away, was provide herself with something warm. The air trapped inside was cold, and though it must circulate through the vents and through the openings at either end, it felt as if it never did, as if this cold air was a dead medium untouched by sunlight for a million years. As a schoolgirl, Sally had once worked at a mushroom farm which grew its crops in underground vaults kept at a constant, low temperature. She had hated the mushroom farm, and the man who ran it—who would touch all the girls in a casually offensive way—and she had buried the memory, but now it came to her as a crumb of comfort. After all, the tunnel was only a long mushroom farm.
Sally steered as near as she could to the middle of the channel, going deeper and deeper into darkness, the headlight of the Number One barely showing up the dark and dirty brickwork on either side, while a light ahead was too faint for her to tell if it was the tunnel end or an oncoming boat. She glanced round from time to time to see the diminishing circle of light behind them, but this swiftly shrank and began to change shape as the slight variations in the tunnel’s path half obscured it.
Arthur was standing on the rear deck with her; Eve was on the top step of the stairs down to the cabin, head and shoulders framed by the lockers on either side of the tiller. Arthur held his hand out from time to time, to catch a drip or judge the distance from the wall, or just for the feel of the cold air beyond the boat’s side. The ridiculous orange poncho, leached of its color in the dark, looked like a sheet he had draped over himself. No one spoke. The throb of the engine, the Number One’s light bouncing back off the ridges of water, the walls narrowing to an invisible point in the distance, the familiar smell of diesel, now stiflingly manifest: Sally began to feel she might do something silly. She might scream, or cry, or stop the engine or drive into a wall, or simply take her hand off the tiller and sit down facing the way they had come. And just as this feeling became unbearable, Arthur took his harmonica out of his pocket and began to play a soft, melancholy tune that filled the space they were traveling through and made it, all at once, stable, three-dimensional. Eve came up the last step onto the deck and said:
“Do you want me to take a turn?”
“Do you want to?”
“Frankly? No. I’m trying to pretend this is a ghost train at the fairground being operated by someone else. I don’t want to be in control. But I will take over if you want me to.”
“I’m all right,” said Sally. “I was trying to pretend I was walking to school in the dark, but I’ve accepted I’m driving a boat through a tunnel, so I’ll carry on doing that.”
Arthur’s playing became livelier, faster. Eve took a step down, giving Sally a clearer view ahead. The light she had seen was closer now.
“Is that the end?” she asked.
Arthur stopped playing and turned his head. “No,” he said. “It’s another boat coming toward you. There’s room to pass, but only just, so you’ll have to hug the wall on your right.”
“Shall I slow down?”
“No. You’re going slow enough. It’ll become sluggish if you drop the revs further. At the point you go past the other boat, throttle right back so you are drifting past each other. And don’t worry about the paintwork. The wall is covered in slime and it won’t do any damage—or none that Anastasia is going to notice.”
Eve had gone down yet another step and her voice was muffled. “Hug something slimy, Sally. I’m sure it wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Oh, I think it would.”
“What have you been doing all your life?” asked Eve.
The sound of the approaching boat’s engine was filling the void between them and its dazzling headlamp, and the outline of its bow was close and then closer, then both boats put their engines into a speed just above idling and they slid past each other.
“How do,” said the man at the stern as he passed them, as if they had met at a stile and Sally had stood aside to let him step over first. Then they were facing darkness again, outside the reach of the Number One’s beam of light, with another light farther off, beyond the vaulted blackness in between. This, too, was another boat, which went by with more noise and less control, and then the circle of light that marked the end became more than a hint, became a fact, then another archway to steer through, and at last they were out in the daylight, in a deep cutting with a church perched on top and a village reaching away up a hill. Eve came up the steps and gave Sally a hug, causing the Number One to veer toward a row of moored boats.
“Steady on,” said Arthur.
“Look,” said Eve, “just remember. A couple of weeks ago our biggest challenge would have been navigating our trolleys down the fruit-and-veg aisle in Sainsbury’s on a Saturday morning. That’s a whole new experience Sally’s coped with.”
“I only meant, mind the other boats,” said Arthur, at his meekest.
“Thank you for the music,” Sally said. “It helped.”
“It frightens the ghosts,” he said. “Keeps them at arm’s length, as it were.”
“What ghosts?” Sally asked.
“Have you met Billy?”
“We have.”
Arthur nodded as if this was just as he expected. “Ask him. He tells a better story than I do.”
Then he smiled at her and she smiled back and wondered how she could so recently have feared the arm that was lurking inside a tent ready to reach out and grab her.
* * *
AFTER THE TUNNEL, THEY REACHED a junction where a branch of the canal turned off to the right.
“Now, you see, you could have gone the wrong way here, if I hadn’t been with you,” Arthur said.
“Hardly,” Sally said. “We can understand the Guide better than that.”
“There again,” said Arthur, “this arm goes to Northampton, which would be perfect for me. Per-fect. I don’t suppose you’ve got time to take me there, though, do you?”
“It’s seventeen locks and five miles,” said Sally, consulting the book. “According to the formula—miles plus locks divided by three—that’s seven hours there and seven hours back. You could walk it in an hour and a half.”
“The feet,” murmured Arthur. “The feet.”
They chugged on through open farmland, Arthur asleep in the cabin, Sally driving, Eve going up and down the gunwale tidying ropes, wiping water
off the rail.
“You’re fidgeting,” Sally said.
“I know. Do you mind dropping me off at the next bridge? I could cycle down to the next village and buy something for lunch.”
“Why would I mind?”
Eve cocked her head in the direction of the cabin.
“Don’t worry,” Sally said. “I can cope.”
Although the rain had stopped it was dull and breezy. Sally, wearing a fleece, felt a different kind of contentment to the sense she’d had the previous day, before Arthur and the tunnel, of eating a particularly long, tasty, fulfilling but not filling meal. Now, she was happy to be traveling, to be moving forward, and it was less dreamy, more risky, but more satisfying.
Arthur came out of the cabin looking tousled and sleepy and asked when they would reach Norton Junction.
“You tell me,” Sally said. “You’re the expert.” Though she realized she had no reason to suppose him one. All she knew about him was that he knew Anastasia; that he was an accountant living in Uttoxeter who took frequent breaks. This much she had heard through the open hatch the night before. And she did not know whether any or all of this was true. “Actually,” she said, “how much time have you spent on a canal boat?”
“You’re great ones for questions, the two of you,” said Arthur. He lay down on the rear deck and trailed his fingers in the water. Sally could think of nothing further to say. She pondered whether they did ask too many questions and came to the conclusion Arthur was wrong; they were normally rather circumspect, finding out about each other bit by bit. What had happened here, Sally concluded, was that Arthur had arrived as a mystery and had made no effort to demystify himself; quite the opposite. Apart from the possibly-not-true Uttoxeter and accountant facts, he had avoided revealing anything at all about himself. She said so.
“You know I want to win,” he said. “I’m not sure I know anything as significant about you.”
Sally thought about 42 Beech Grove and the way she had behaved in those impossibly different days, and from that perspective she recognized that Arthur had a perfect right to tell them nothing and they had no right to probe. So she looked at the Guide, calculated where they were and said: “We should reach the locks before Norton Junction about teatime. We can decide then whether to carry on tonight as far as the wharf where we’ll be meeting Anastasia, or leave it until tomorrow morning.”
The Narrowboat Summer Page 11