The Narrowboat Summer

by Anne Youngson

  Arthur became upright by some sequence of movements she missed and dried his hand on his trouser leg.

  “I’m being of no use to you, look. I’m doing nothing at all to earn my passage in this boat, so I will make a cup of tea.”

  * * *

  As the day wore on, winding round bends, acknowledging passing boats, mooring for a lunch of bread, cheese, pâté, pork pie, Scotch eggs and ham (“Well, I didn’t know what Arthur liked,” Eve said; it turned out he liked all of it and ate a considerable amount), Arthur became restless. He kept checking the Guide, then his watch. They passed over an aqueduct and reached a point where the railway and the motorway and the A5 all ran more or less parallel to, even alongside, the canal. Eve was excited by all these engineering feats: most impressed by the ability of the Romans to cut a straight road going in the right direction, least impressed by the ability of modern civil engineers to create a six-lane highway on stilts. The canal came in above the railway, in Eve’s hierarchy, because it involved water.

  “Fluids,” she said. “So hard to manage. In contrast to rock and iron and steel and concrete, which can be counted on not to change shape even if they change position.”

  Arthur recovered briefly from his self-absorption and argued that the skill required was less relevant than the social impact of the various ways of facilitating movement. On this basis, he said, the railway would be in first place, followed by the canal, then the motorway, leaving the Roman road in last place. After all, it had just been about helping a conquering army to conquer, then maintaining control of the conquered. Eve, pleased to be challenged, began to construct an argument that the Roman road still came out on top because the whole pattern of modern Britain was imprinted with the legacy of that conquest.

  “In what way?” said Arthur, and Eve had to admit that she had no idea, but she was certain it was a truth she would be able to prove if she ever bothered to research it. Sally felt absurdly fond of both of them.

  When they reached the first of the seven locks they needed to go through to reach Norton Junction, Arthur proposed they stop for the night. It was four o’clock.

  “I thought we could keep going to Norton Junction,” Eve said. “There’s a pub there. And we wouldn’t be sandwiched between the railway and the motorway, like we are here.”

  The lock gates ahead of them opened and a boat came through.

  “Maybe some of the locks, then,” said Arthur, and Eve gestured to the oncoming boat crew to leave the gates open.

  Eve drove and Sally and Arthur worked the locks, as they had done the previous day, with Arthur climbing aboard between each one and Sally walking on. Only, yesterday she had been trying to avoid being close to Arthur and today she was simply pleased to be walking, to feel the breeze on her face, to contemplate the varying rates of forward propulsion of the cars on the motorway, the occasional train, the Number One and herself. She was walking faster than the Number One; the trains were traveling faster than the cars. But to say that the cars were therefore going faster than she was walking was like comparing a pea to a pumpkin, or a mouse to an elephant; the same broad categories (vegetable, mammal), but in no other way to be placed in the same box charted on the same scale.

  They went through six locks, passed under a railway as a train, obscenely loud, went over it. There was a quiet stretch before the final lock, yet within reach of the road where, according to the Guide, the bus from Long Buckby station would pass.

  “Let’s stop here,” said Arthur, climbing back on board. “Look, a hedge, a tree—perfect for a man with a tent.”

  As soon as they had banged in the stakes, tightened the ropes and Arthur had, with a flick of the wrist, erected his tent, he insisted they go to the pub. It was half a mile down the towpath, but Arthur was perky now, naming the wild flowers they passed, pointing out a butterfly, spotting a heron hidden by trees. Eve and Sally would have walked straight past it without noticing. He would buy them supper, he said, when they reached the pub.

  “Aren’t we supposed to pay you, for working the locks?” said Eve. “Isn’t that how it works?”

  “When I’ve spent the best part of a day idling in your cabin, drinking your tea, eating your biscuits, your pies and your bread? No, no. This is how it works: I treat you. What will it be?”

  There were people in the pub who knew Arthur. Twice someone came over to say hello—two men, then a man and a woman—and at least three more times Sally was conscious of a slight nod exchanged with someone she could not pick out from the crowd, for the pub was crowded. Arthur appeared to want to talk to no one but them. He concentrated on Sally and Eve, no matter what the distractions. The people who spoke to him, he responded to with a smile, but without breaking off from what he was saying. Sally had the impression he was exerting a force field to keep everyone who might otherwise have tried to engage him in conversation at a distance.

  He told them stories about hitching lifts from boats on the canal, working the locks in exchange for sleeping on board, if there was room, or in exchange for meals if there was no room and he had to sleep on the towpath. He had been doing this, he said, for fifty years. He knew the waterways as well as anyone, having learned about them on foot, on boats, from buses and trains, traveling to and from Uttoxeter. It was rare, nowadays, for him to have to appeal to strangers for a lift. He knew so many of the people who spent their lives, or much of their lives, on the canal. When the weather was fine he would walk for days without hailing a boat, knowing an acquaintance would turn up soon and he would be spared the necessity of making himself known to someone new.

  “Like us,” Eve said.

  “Except you haven’t,” said Sally. “Made yourself known to us. You’ve behaved as if we already knew you.”

  Arthur put down the pint glass of lemonade he had been raising to his lips and touched her hand. Sally was aware she had not touched him, or been touched by him, before—she’d been careful to avoid it—and she was surprised at how firm, warm and dry was the sensation of his fingers upon hers.

  “But you’re on the Number One,” he said. “How could I treat as strangers those who are living and working the Number One?” He drank some lemonade. “And, of course,” he said, with a look at once sheepish and sly, “I have to be careful because you will tell Anastasia you have met me. She will want a report. You will give her one. It has been on my mind.”

  “You talk as if you won’t see her yourself,” said Sally. “But you will, if you wait around.”

  “If I see her,” said Arthur, “she will plunge in and uncover everything I keep hidden, things I keep hidden even from myself. I am like a cupboard, to Anastasia. She gets in there and inspects the contents, makes judgments, throws things out, rearranges what’s left, cleans all the crumbs and dust out of the corners and lays down fresh sheets of lining paper to keep in peak condition those things she has newly sorted. There are times when I need Anastasia, when I need my shelves emptied, cleaned and reorganized. But at this moment, I’m not sure.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Eve. “That’s the feeling I get, too. That she has somehow spotted what you were trying to ignore. And she makes you challenge what you never thought to challenge, because it suddenly seems obvious that you should have been.”

  Sally wasn’t sure she knew what they were talking about. She wondered whether Arthur and Eve—who were both, in different ways, so sure of themselves—found Anastasia a challenge to that sure-ness and were perked up by it. Perhaps she was immune because she was so inchoate, so unformed, so lacking in certainties to be challenged, without surfaces for a challenge to bounce off.

  “So what are you saying?” said Eve. “You’re going to run away before Anastasia gets here?”

  “That’s about it,” Arthur whispered, as if Anastasia might hear him and thwart his plan if he spoke aloud. “I’m planning to escape.”

  Now that he was suggesting it, Sally regretted he was going but still wanted him gone. She had traveled from wishing he had never tu
rned up to finding his company soothing, but she wanted him gone so she could coalesce her ideas of who he was without the constant distraction of his actual presence. It had always been one of the things she had waited for: for someone to go, for an experience to be over, because only then would she be able to make sense of it. When she was alone. But there was a risk Arthur was going too soon, before all his complexities had revealed themselves, and she would find, when she tried to recall the memory of him, that she was missing parts of the story; he would be like a TV serial where some of the episodes had not been shown even though the end had been reached.

  “You’ve used the word ‘escape’ before,” Sally said. “I overheard you talking to Eve about it. She said she was escaping to avoid making a decision, but you didn’t say what you were escaping from.”

  “Yes,” said Arthur. He looked not at Sally but at Eve. “I would say, having known you now for so many hours”—he held his hands out to indicate a stretch of time bigger than the empty plate in front of him, smaller than the width of the table—“that it isn’t decisions you’re running away from. It’s the pressure of having to win.”

  “Would you?” Eve said. “Well, I have no idea what you’re running away from because, having known you for this long”—she held out her hands to indicate an area the width of her wine glass—“I don’t know you at all.”

  “I will tell you,” said Arthur, “but first I want to say”—he turned to Sally—“that I don’t believe you know what you are running away from. But whatever it is, you have to escape from your fear of failure first.”

  “She’s escaping from tedium,” Eve said. “From mediocrity, sameness.”

  Sally felt closer, in that moment, to Arthur than to Eve. “Now you,” she said to him.

  “Responsibility,” Arthur said. “Pity me, dear ladies, because you know, and I know, there is no escape from that. Once taken up, the burden of it never leaves you, even if you walk away, let fall whatever may fall when you no longer stand and hold it. Still, it is inescapable. Take it or reject it, what follows? Toil or guilt. The only thing to do is choose between them.”

  The towpath was too narrow for them to walk three abreast between the junction and the Number One. On the way to the pub, Arthur had gone ahead. On the way back, Eve did. She had the torch, so Sally and Arthur fell into place alongside each other, following the beam partially obscured by Eve’s legs. As the noise of the pub died away behind them, all the other noises of the night became audible once more: a rumble from the steady but reduced flow of traffic on the A5; the sound of voices or laughter from moored boats; the cough of a smoker sent out to perch on a bollard for his late-night cigarette; the screech of an owl and the harsh, insistent barking of a fox.

  “In Midsomer Murders,” Sally said, “a fox barking always means a murder is about to be committed.”

  “And so it may,” said Arthur.

  “Will we see you again,” Sally asked, “before we get back to Uxbridge?”

  “It is possible, my lovely lady. It is possible.”

  The next morning, he was gone.

  * * *

  NOAH WOKE EVE WHEN THE sun was still low in the sky to the east. She knew by the way it lit up the ceiling above her that it was nowhere near time to get up, but Noah was waiting by the cabin door, expressing his urgent need to leave, with a sniffle and a scrabble and an anxious cock of his head which she found harder to resist than his howls. These she had become accustomed to and knew were merely a form of teenage overacting.

  She went through to the galley and opened the door for him, watched from the window as he explored the patch of ground where Arthur’s tent had been, analyzed its every vestige of scent. Then sat and looked the way they had come the previous day, toward the bridge where the road to Long Buckby crossed the canal, where the bus stopped. Eve watched Noah and the empty patch of ground, which looked both surprisingly empty and just as she expected it to be.

  A man from a boat moored on the towpath in the direction Noah was looking had come out half dressed and was peeing on the weeds by the hedge. It would be the only good thing about being born a man, Eve thought. Otherwise, she felt sorry for those who had been born male. She had realized, when she started work, the burden of having expectations to live up to, a position within a masculine society to maintain, that the men carried and she didn’t. Expectations of her were so low as to be easy to exceed.

  And now, when the idea of diversity, the constant challenges to the notion that being a man required and even mandated certain patterns of behavior, they were, instead of being liberated, cast into a darkness where the rules were not yet clear enough for them to be sure they had read and interpreted them correctly.

  Sally came through from her cabin.

  “Has Arthur gone?”

  “So it seems. Noah woke me. I can’t tell if he’s sorry to see Arthur go or keen to make sure he’s really gone.”

  “I know how he feels,” said Sally. “Now we need to prepare ourselves for Anastasia.”

  Eve looked round the cabin, trying to see it as Anastasia would see it. It was clean, as Anastasia would have it, and neat, but not quite neat enough. There was a fleece discarded by Sally on the bench; someone had left the coffee jar on the worktop instead of putting it away, at once, in its space in the cupboard; a book was lying on the table. Eve put the coffee jar away. Sally picked up the fleece and put it on. They were left with the book. It had a plain, red, scuffed cloth cover and discoloration on the page edges; it did not look like a book that had been read once and placed on a shelf. It looked like a book that had been read again and again and carried about and left lying in the sun. Eve bent sideways to read the spine.

  “Mr. Lucton’s Freedom,” she read. “Yours?”

  Sally shook her head. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  Eve opened the front cover and found a note tucked inside. It was written on the back of a piece of scrap paper used to score a Scrabble game—E: 329, S: 387, Eve noted, before she unfolded it. It read:

  Ladies,

  Speaking of escape, as we did, or nearly did, I invite you to read this book which has been with me for many years. I trust you not to lose it or destroy it. I will reclaim it when next I visit the Number One. If you should have gone before I return, please leave it in Anastasia’s keeping.

  It was signed: The Hitchhiker.

  Eve picked the book up and looked for clues about the story and the author, as she would do with any other book she was thinking about reading. But there were none. It was a book-club edition of a novel by Francis Brett Young, and told her nothing except that he had written a number of other titles, all of them unfamiliar, and this edition had been published in 1941. It was in three parts, titled North Bromwich, The Country of Strange Adventures and Quietest Under the Sun.

  She closed it up and held it out to Sally, who took it and tucked it into the pocket of her fleece. She turned away and started to leave the cabin, then came back.

  “Is it all right if I read it first?” she said.

  “Of course,” said Eve. “You can let me know if it’s worth reading.”

  “I don’t think Arthur would have left it if it wasn’t,” Sally said.

  * * *

  Eve and Sally waited for Anastasia and she did not come. They occupied themselves with wiping and mopping and rearranging until every corner of every object was square with the object beside it, and anything identical with its neighbor was lined, facing the same way, with no gaps between, or evenly spaced gaps where gaps were necessary. All the time, they were watching the bridge, noting the arrival and departure of buses, pausing in their work as one departed, to wait for the sturdy figure of Anastasia to come stumping down the steps to the towpath.

  After lunch, Eve set off on her bicycle to the station to look at the timetable, and to see how far away the station was—or so she said. Sally noted that Eve’s impatience for Anastasia’s arrival was greater than hers. She remembered all the times when someone was expecte
d at 42 Beech Grove, how she would have finished preparing for their arrival long before they could be expected to appear, and then had been unable to do anything except wait until the doorbell rang. Then, once whoever it was had finally come, after a moment or two of relief that they had turned up, more or less at the time expected, she would be looking forward, anxiously and eagerly, to the moment they left. Now it was Eve behaving as she had behaved in the past, while she had adapted so readily to canal time, where nothing is accomplished quickly, and times of arrival may be agreed in terms of a given week rather than a given hour.

  She made herself a cup of tea and sat in the well at the front of the boat, sheltered from the slight breeze, with an eye-level view of the short grass on the edge of the towpath and, if she lifted her eyes higher, of a section of bricks on the bridge with, above that, a tangle of clouds lit up by the sun. She opened Mr. Lucton’s Freedom and began to read.

  * * *

  Eve was subject to a number of annoyances as she cycled to Long Buckby. First, the wind, which was inconsistent enough to be irritating and steady enough to make pedalling hard work. Then there was the traffic. It was not a wide enough road for the vehicles coming up behind her to overtake safely if there was something coming the other way or if the driver could not be sure there was nothing coming. Hardly one of them got it right, as far as Eve was concerned. Some of them dawdled along behind her far too long, making her anxious, when there was ample room to pass. Others came past at speed when there was a risk they would meet something equally speedy at just the moment when they were occupying the middle of the road. There were gratings and potholes along the shoulder which Eve was forced to bump into and over by drivers too careless or too nervous to pull out far enough. On the other hand, she felt patronized by those who made a point of going as far as the opposite shoulder to be sure of giving her sufficient space to wobble, weave or fall off. And finally there were the other cyclists. She met one group coming toward her and another overtook her. They were all wearing Lycra. They were moving at a speed she thought quite unnecessary but secretly aspired to; they made it plain they felt themselves to be a species apart by not acknowledging her nod of recognition, one cyclist to another.