The Narrowboat Summer

by Anne Youngson

  There were only five cookery books on the five shelves of randomly stocked secondhand books. Any customer deciding to buy the first book that a hand fell upon was as likely to carry off a Booker Prize winner as the self-published memoirs of a railway enthusiast. Eve’s grandmother would have loved it, and so did Eve.

  Dogged persistence in reading the spines, not all of them the right way up, eventually revealed that her choice was between Delia Smith’s Winter Cookery, 1001 Things to Cook in Your Slow Cooker, Italian Classics, Gluten-Free Cooking for One and Claudia Roden’s Mediterranean Cookery. Delia seemed the safe choice. The aunt in whose house she had spent so much of her childhood had been fond of saying, when serving up anything more challenging than casseroles and pasta sauces, “You can always trust Delia.” But it wasn’t winter, and Eve didn’t feel like playing safe. She was surprised to find, on consulting the index of Italian classics, that much of the bland slop her aunt had served up—indeed much of the slop she had prepared for herself and friends, was classic Italian, albeit executed with fewer ingredients and omitting all the processes which presumably made the food as tasty as an Italian would expect. There was no slow cooker on the boat. She might have bought it anyway, for the outlay of £1:50, to force herself to be creative in adapting the recipes for any old saucepan with a lid, but when she looked inside, there were no recipes she could not have found in the battered Good Housekeeping that was already on the boat. The gluten-free book had dull recipes featuring alternative ingredients that Eve could not believe were either freely available in canal-side shops or at all nice. So that left Claudia Roden. She picked the book up and it fell open at a page with a recipe for Imam Bayildi, also known, so it said, as “The Imam Fainted.” On the facing page was a line drawing of a pair of hands shaping a vine leaf into a parcel over a spoonful of stuffing. She riffled through the pages and found she could learn how to make Mr. Hiély’s Rabbit with Onions. She felt the presence of the Imam and Mr. Hiély as she read. At the front were pages of pictures of vegetables she knew (cucumber, Florence fennel), but looking so much fuller of possibility than the same vegetables on a supermarket rack, and also vegetables she had hardly heard of and never seen (colocasia, kohlrabi). Throughout the book—accompanied by line drawings which made preparing an artichoke, for example, look like something within her grasp—were sumptuous pictures of food, on plates or in markets. She wanted to be, right now, within reach of it all.

  She was so enthralled, felt so emotionally connected to the book in her hand, that when another customer, trying to read the random spines beside her, noticed what she was holding and said: “Oh, that’s good. If you haven’t already got it, you should definitely buy it,” she immediately hated the woman for implying that she was more familiar than Eve with the loved object. She snapped it shut and carried it to the till, where a lady with as many wrinkles as Anastasia but the softest skin, so that they fell in gentle pleats and made her face look sad, caring and lovable, pointed out a multitude of blobs and stains on the pages, wondering if one pound fifty wasn’t too much—might a pound be more appropriate, or even fifty pence? To Eve, these stains were like the missing or misplaced jigsaw pieces, evidence that this book had had a life before.

  “You must take two pounds for it,” she said. “I insist.”

  * * *

  The next set of locks was the Hatton flight, which went up in a daunting hill of gates ahead of them. They moored behind the Grimm. There was no sign of either Trompette or Billy, but since these were double locks, Sally was sure Trompette would want to set off when they did so whichever of them was not driving could work the locks for her. Billy, Sally assumed, would be asleep or otherwise engaged out of sight until the last lock had been negotiated. In this, she was wrong. It was Billy who came and rapped on the door as they ate breakfast next morning.

  “Going up?” he asked, jerking his head toward the flight stretched out above them. “Want a buddy through the locks?”

  Billy and Trompette worked as a team through the whole twenty-one locks in the flight, one driving in, one preparing and filling the lock, then, as the Grimm reached the top level and the gates were ready to be opened, whoever had been driving would step off and the one doing the work would step on and take the tiller. They were like butterflies, constantly moving, changing position, coming to rest for a short moment then off again. It was impossible to have a conversation and Sally wanted to have a conversation. They had become familiar to her without being known.

  Eve drove the Number One through the first ten locks and Sally thought that, when she took over, there would be time to talk in the dripping gloom of an empty lock while they waited for it to fill up. This, however, proved impossible. It was necessary to keep the boat steady in the lock, avoid it drifting too far forward, where the nose could become trapped on a beam of the gate, or too far back, where the sill could foul the rudder, and the concentration needed, plus the noise, the engines and the roar of the water coming into the lock, meant that nothing could be said that needed consideration, until the last, calm moments as the lock filled right to the top, when the Grimm’s crew swapped over.

  It felt like a purposeful morning because there was a purpose to their journey. When they passed hire boats coming down, full of families or parties of friends flaunting quite a bit of burned, red flesh and laughter, demonstrating what even after a relatively short time on the canal Sally knew was clumsy incompetence, she wondered what their purpose was. Why spend so many hours filling and emptying locks and moving a boat through them, only to have (echoes of those family walks with Duncan and the children) the task of doing it all again before the end of the holiday.

  By lunchtime they were through the locks and moored one behind the other. Sally and Eve made sandwiches for the four of them, Billy brought some cold beers, and there was a lolling laziness to the afternoon that contrasted to the morning’s activity. Sally listened to the idle remarks Trompette and Billy and Eve were bandying back and forth, sitting in the sunshine with no work to do, full of food and drink and talking about nothing in particular. In the past, she would always have been the one who stood up first to go and do something, anything. Like clearing away a plate of food from in front of a dinner guest when, as it turned out, he had not finished eating it.

  They went through a short, dripping and slimy tunnel with the Number One in the lead. When Sally and Eve agreed they would moor for the night in a rural spot, out of sight and earshot of the motorway and the railway line, fields on either side, Sally expected Grimm to stop, too, but it went cruising past, Billy leaning down to blast the horn in farewell. Eve announced she was going to take Noah for a walk, with a map. She was planning to use the footpaths marked as well as the towpath, to be able to do a circuit and avoid walking the same path twice.

  “We’ve become too linear, don’t you think?” she said to Sally. “A bit one-way.”

  “Can I come?” Sally said.

  It took them two hours, and would have taken Eve longer had Sally not been with her. After Eve had paused to consult the map at every point where a decision had to be made on which path to take, Sally took it away from her.

  “It’s a guide, not a recipe,” she said. It was hot and standing still made her legs ache. “Look, you can tell where we are because of what we can see—that hill, that spire, that farmhouse—and because we know where we are in relation to the motorway. There’s only one place on this map we can be. It doesn’t matter if there are three tracks instead of two. Tracks are created or get overgrown; hills, houses, churches and motorways don’t tend to move about.”

  “Oh, no,” said Eve. “I’ve delved into the detail and missed the big picture. I hate people who do that.”

  “You just don’t like fuzziness. I’m never well enough informed to expect anything else.”

  When they had been walking for about half an hour, Sally began to wonder why she had offered to come, remembering again the family walks and how relieved she had been when they stopped. She had prom
ised herself then that she would never again tramp up and down hills without the satisfaction of arriving somewhere that was an actual destination.

  “Why are we doing this?” she asked Eve. “When we could be back at the boat reading a book and drinking wine.”

  “Because,” said Eve, then laughed. “Because Noah enjoys it.”

  Noah was certainly exhibiting signs of enjoyment, like a child unexpectedly and unusually finding itself in an adventure playground.

  “But he’s only a dog,” said Sally. “And in case you’ve forgotten, I don’t care for dogs, so why should I be putting myself out to entertain him?”

  “All right,” said Eve. “Now you’ve asked the question, let’s create a list of all the reasons why marching up hill and down dale is something we might choose to do. Number one, we get to see the countryside.”

  “We can do that from the Number One.”

  “No, we can’t. We can look at the hills but we can’t get in among them, see the view from the top, find out what the scenery is like on the other side. We can’t walk right up to this tree, for example, and marvel at the pattern of the bark.”

  They both stopped walking and looked at the tree Eve had selected, which had deeply fissured and lined bark—not unlike, Sally thought, Anastasia’s face.

  “It is worth looking at,” she admitted, “but is it worth the effort?”

  “All right, then: number two—it’s good for us. It helps us lose weight.”

  “I don’t want to lose weight.”

  “No, but I do. I always have, for as long as I can remember. It is my most consistent fantasy, that one day, I will wake up and be slim. I will unfold myself from my bed and my legs and arms and stomach will be firm and sleek. Nothing will quiver or droop. I know, I know, it’s a ridiculous fantasy, and I know that being slim doesn’t equal being happy and that being slim doesn’t necessarily mean having firm flesh either. I know all that, and I also know that in the overall scheme of things, being slim is a goal which is well within my capabilities—unlike, for example, playing hockey for England or winning X Factor or having a novel published or becoming CEO of a Footsie 100 company. Not that those aren’t fantasies worth dreaming about—except winning X Factor. I can’t imagine what I would wear on TV that wouldn’t make me look fat.”

  “For goodness’ sake,” said Sally. “You’re not fat.”

  They walked on for a while in silence. Noah emerged from the undergrowth with a dead rabbit in his jaws. Whether it had been dead when he came across it or not, he looked like a dog who expected admiration and reward. Eve urged him to put the rabbit down; Sally grabbed his jaws and eased them apart till it fell on the path, then kicked it into the long grass.

  “What’s number three?” she asked.

  “Keeping fit?”

  “In principle, I suppose. In practice, working the locks is doing it for me.”

  “And me.”

  A bramble shoot trailing over the path caught Eve’s leg as she pushed past it. She stopped, licked a finger and wiped away the beads of blood that welled up from the scratch. The slightness of the hurt and the ease with which Eve dealt with it made Sally think of Anastasia.

  “We should be counting ourselves lucky to be able to do this. To walk and talk and be free of pain.”

  “You’re thinking of Anastasia,” said Eve. “And you’re right. Here we are, in the sunshine, in the middle of the countryside, with Noah thrown in. So is that reason number four: because we can?”

  “No. That’s a reason to be thankful, but not a reason for getting hot and scratched and lost.”

  “I’ve a feeling you’re going to say this doesn’t count, but number four is the pleasure of the book and the wine when you finally get back to it, which I contend is deeper and sweeter than the book and the wine without the five-mile hike beforehand.”

  “That’s about the best reason you’ve come up with.”

  “Oh, is it? Good. It must be your turn now.”

  So Sally told her about the walks she had done with her family, and how, now that she looked back on it, she could see that the advantages were time to think and the chance to say, in a casual way, things that there never seemed to be a right time to say over the business of breakfast, supper, household maintenance and childcare, which occupied most of their time and their conversation when they were at home.

  “I think number four, feeling happy to be back home, was the greatest pleasure, but the other two were five and six, if you like.”

  “But I don’t know if I accept those,” said Eve, “in our current way of life. The joy of moving all the time, so slowly and without physical effort—leaving aside the locks—is that there is endless time for the mind to wander. Whenever I think of something I want to say, however random, I don’t feel I have to wait for the right moment to say it.”

  “True. We have thinking time and we can talk about anything, whenever it occurs to us. I’ve never been in that position before. Are you going to tell me it’s always been like that for you?”

  “No, no it hasn’t. Is it because we are in suspense? Between our serious past and an unknown but probably serious future? So, at this moment, anything is possible, nothing is prohibited?”

  “I told my hairdresser,” said Sally, “the day after I told Duncan I was leaving, that I was going to have a gap year. I think that’s what we’re in. A gap.”

  “A good gap,” said Eve. “Just look at that view!”

  * * *

  IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF the afternoon when they came across Grimm again. It was moored in a surprisingly rural stretch just before they began the long trek through Birmingham’s industrial outposts, suburbs, center, and industrial hinterland. Trompette was sitting on the roof facing the canal, knitting.

  “You need to moor here,” Trompette said. “There be dragons.” She pointed in the direction they were traveling.

  Sally steered into the bank, as directed, but left the engine idling.

  “We have to go past the dragons sometime,” she said. “And it’s early to stop.”

  “Yes,” said Trompette, who had hopped off onto the towpath still holding her knitting, “but there’s nowhere safe to moor after this until you’re right in the middle, and it’s too late to start.”

  As soon as they’d secured the boat, Eve cycled off to the nearest shops to look for the ingredients for the recipes she wanted to try from her new, much-used cookbook. Sally climbed onto the roof of Grimm, shifting a bag of potting compost, an umbrella, a spare fender wrapped up in an old anorak and a watering can to make enough space to sit down, close enough to Trompette to be able to see what she was doing. The knitting was in several colors, all somewhere in the green spectrum with splashes of scarlet. Trompette was wearing a smock with two deep pockets that extended the width of the garment, side seam to side seam. The balls of wool were in these pockets, presumably stashed in some order Trompette understood because she hardly seemed to look before plunging in a hand to pull up another strand, severing one she had been using with her teeth as she did so. The worked piece hanging below the needles, apart from being dazzlingly beautiful in its range of colors, was not identifiable as fitting any particular purpose. Scarf, jumper, wall-hanging—it could be any of those. Sally, moving the watering can again to be able to stretch her legs out, asked what it was.

  Trompette held it up, stretching the knitted fabric out across the needles so the sun caught and flashed on the brilliant scarlet, and illuminated the pale fern greens so that they stood out against the deep, almost inky emerald shade that reminded Sally of the head of a male teal duck.

  “What do you think?” Trompette asked. It was a rhomboid, Sally saw now: wider at the base with a bit of a taper toward the top. If she had knitted it—supposing she was capable of producing something that combined random colors so skillfully—the narrowing would have been a mistake, the result of stitches inadvertently dropped in a moment of inattentiveness. But for all she appeared to be completely indifferent to wh
at her hands were doing, Trompette’s knitting looked crafted, carefully done.

  “It could be anything,” Sally said. “Do you know what it’s going to be?”

  “Not yet,” Trompette said. “Waistcoat probably.”

  At once Sally could see it, the drape of the garment hanging from Trompette’s shoulders, its colors separating and merging as it swung with her movements.

  “That’ll be lovely,” she said. “It’ll suit you.”

  “Oh, not for me,” said Trompette, never pausing in her work. “To sell.”

  “Well, I’d buy it,” said Sally.

  Trompette turned toward her and held the knitting up against her. “Yes,” she said. “That will work. I’ll knit it for you, then.”

  “Do you do much of this?” Sally asked. “Knitting things to sell?”

  “When I can get the wool. I’ve a friend lives over there”—she indicated a direction somewhere northwest of them—“who collects it for me and I pick it up when we pass.”

  “You’re very creative,” Sally said, mesmerized by the action of Trompette’s neat little fingers, the way the strands came up out of her pockets and combined into the fabric. Trompette shrugged.