“I don’t have a choice,” she said, “if I want clothes.”
“You mean, you make the things you wear?” Sally was aware that the tone of this was too close to the patronizing exclamations of adults to the children selling cupcakes for Red Nose Day. “Sorry, I don’t mean to sound as if I’m congratulating a performing monkey. I am genuinely amazed and impressed. Everything you wear is so perfect.”
Trompette smiled, leaned sideways and rested her head briefly on Sally’s shoulder.
“You’re so sweet. I can spot a bullshitter, no problem. You’re not it.”
Billy came out of the Grimm carrying his guitar. He set it on the grass, hitched up his jeans, scratched his belly through his T-shirt, then sat down and began to replace one of the strings. There were bees busy among the wild flowers, an occasional plane flying over, a distant rumble of traffic, the sound of voices approaching then fading away as cyclists and walkers came along the towpath. The thrum of a boat’s engine and a greeting as it passed.
“How did you two meet?” Sally asked.
“Ah,” Billy said. “Shall I tell you a story?”
“Go on, then.”
“We met on the water, but the water we met on was frozen. Frozen hard. So hard, you could skate on it—and that’s what we were doing, the day we met: skating. This was in Canada, and we were both, in a way, on the run. Trompette had been sent to stay with friends of her mother’s—perhaps too late—because her stepfather had begun to show an unhealthy interest. So there was Trompette, exiled to a small Canadian town where nothing she did or said or wore, none of her opinions, her habits or her attitudes fitted in. She was on the run from her stepfather and was contemplating where to run to next. I was on the run from a criminal past. Not from any actual criminal charges but from the pressure to commit crime, which was the result of the family I was brought up in. Three of my four brothers, all older than me, had been in jail. It was only a matter of time before I would be the one the police caught in an alley with too many drugs and an incriminating phone. So I stole a bit of money, or siphoned off a bit of money someone else had stolen, placed a few clever bets, and left the country.
“I was traveling through Canada, finding jobs to do, keeping out of trouble, but I was homeless and rootless. I was beginning to think, maybe I should give in, go back to the house I used to live in where I was never alone, to escape from this life where I was always on the outside. There you have it: two refugees who have escaped one fate, or the threat of a fate, only to find themselves doomed to isolation in a place they never should have been.
“Still, we might never have found each other but for the lake that was frozen and the weather pattern, which was bringing a warm front in from the west. The sun was shining, the day was warm enough to lift your spirits however far into the depths of your boots they had sunk, and we had both strapped on borrowed skates and gone out on the ice, along with the entire population of the town—or at least those who were physically capable of skating.
“And then, in the midst of this throng of expert skaters, among whom I was the only one knowing nothing about anyone else, knowing no one’s name, how did I manage to find Trompette? The warm front—remember that? The sun got us all out there in the sparkle and the freshness, but this was not the first hint of warmth; there had been other warm days. The season was changing and the ice was growing thinner and thinner, starting from the middle where the deepest water was.
“The other people on the lake, the Canadians, were alert to the signs that the ice was about to crack; they knew where it was thinnest; all the variations in color, in the sound it made as a set of skates sped over it; they knew what it meant, and there came a moment when these signs, to them, became inescapable and they turned and skated toward the edge. Trompette went with them. She was in company with the family she was living with and did not want to do anything that might make them scoff at her. Anything more than the hundreds of things she did, unwittingly, every day. But I carried on skating away from the pack, going out into the middle, facing the open, so that I didn’t even see them go. No one called out and I only knew I was in danger when the ice in front of me cracked. I heard it and I saw it and, even as a child from Croydon, I knew what that meant and I was terrified.
“I turned back toward the shore and saw the population of the town either skating away from me or already in a place of safety. My skates slid sideways; my knees started to give; behind me, the crack was widening, the edge beginning to crumble. I was seconds away from falling into the water, which—I didn’t know this at the time but was told later—was so cold I would have lived for no more than three minutes had I gone in.
“But one figure was ready to save me. Someone was skating back toward me, holding out a hand for me to grasp, to steady myself, set my feet back square on the ice and begin to skate away, away from the hole getting larger and larger behind us, but not fast enough to catch us, me and my savior. The only person who came to help me. Trompette.
“After that, we ran away together. And if you’re wondering why she bothers to stay with someone as unsavory to be with as I am sure you think I am—and I wouldn’t disagree with you—well, that is why. She saved my life and so we are bound together for eternity. I cannot leave her because I owe her too much; she cannot leave me because she has taken to herself the responsibility for my well-being.
“We met, my dear Sally, when the ice cracked.”
Sally turned toward Trompette, who put down her knitting with a sigh and stretched her arms above her head.
“We were at school together,” she said.
Sally looked back at Billy, who shrugged.
“Metaphorical ice, metaphorical crack,” he said. “Still, a version of the truth.”
* * *
Eve came back and went into the galley on the Number One and began to make cooking sounds. Sally looked up from the book she was reading and saw Billy setting off down the towpath on Eve’s bike, which she had left leaning against the hedge. He looked unsteady and Sally was cross with him for borrowing it without asking, so she put her book down and went after him. He wobbled past a few other boats on the mooring and reached a bend. He was out of sight when Sally, walking briskly, heard a splash. She speeded up and ran round the corner to see the bike’s front wheel, still spinning, sticking up above the bank, the rest of the machine submerged. Billy was in the water beside it, upright but waving his arms about and stationary. Sally’s first thought was to rescue the bike, and she ran toward it, reaching out to grasp the wheel, but before her hand came close to the bike, it was grabbed by another hand, Billy’s hand—perhaps that was what she had intended to do in the first place: rescue the human not the machine, and maybe she pulled back against his grip with the intention of heaving him up onto the towpath. However it happened, one moment she was trying to help and the next, her feet were slipping on the grassy edge and she tumbled into the canal. It was surprisingly warm and she missed the bike, or at least those parts of it which might have bruised or cut her, but then it proved difficult to right herself. She seemed to be held in the silky, silt-filled water, rolling over too quickly to close her mouth in time. There was a moment of panic before she broke the surface and found herself wrapped in Billy’s arms, being hoisted back onto the path. He climbed out after her, then sat beside her, squeezing the water from his hair with his hands.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I fell in, the bike fell in, you fell in. Now you and I are out again. And look…” He stood up and pulled the bike from the canal, lifting it clear of Sally and dumping it on the path behind them. “The bike is out, too.”
“I don’t know what you thought you were doing,” Sally said. She meant, what was he doing borrowing Eve’s bike, but the murkier question of what he was doing when he gripped her hand—pulling her in or trying to haul himself out—was uppermost in her mind.
“I never think,” Billy said. “I just do.”
He stood the bike upright and looked
as if he might be about to get on it, so Sally, moving awkwardly in her saturated clothing and beginning to feel chilly despite the sunshine, took it from him.
“I’ll take it,” she said.
“You know the old canal joke?” Billy said, as they walked back. “What do you shout if there’s a man overboard?” Sally shook her head. “Stand up!”
He was telling her there was no risk of drowning in the canal, she understood that. Though clearly it wasn’t true, because had she been trapped beneath the bike, injured, she might not have been able to reach the surface in time.
“I’ll remember that,” she said, “next time I see you thrashing about in the water.”
He laughed and put his arm round her, pulled her against him, the boniness of his young, thin frame pressing against her ribs.
She climbed into the front well of the Number One and dried herself, changed into dry clothes before going through to the galley.
“Billy borrowed your bike,” she told Eve, “and fell into the canal with it. I’ve brought it back, but I haven’t checked it’s all right.”
“It had better be,” Eve said, concentrating on peeling an eggplant. “I’ll skin the little bastard if he’s wrecked it. I don’t know, feckless or what? No respect for property.” She looked up. “Hang on, why’s your hair wet?”
“I fell in, too, trying to get them out.”
“Them?”
“Billy and the bike.”
“Oh, I’d have left Billy. Are you all right?”
“Of course. The canal’s not deep, you know, just rather dirty.”
But when Eve insisted on opening a bottle of wine, although it was too early to start drinking, or would have been at 42 Beech Grove, she found she felt better for having drunk a glass.
* * *
SALLY HAD FINISHED Mr. Lucton’s Freedom and passed it on to Eve.
“You should read it,” she said.
Eve had always felt books were important to her. She read more than most of her acquaintances, and she read what she considered to be an admirably wide range: biographies, history and fiction. But having spent a few weeks in company with Sally, who seemed to read at least two books a week and was treating the charity shops like lending libraries—buying a supply, reading them and dropping them off at the next source of new titles—she had downgraded herself from “keen reader” to “a bit of a reader.” Sally chose books Eve had never heard of—title, author, genre—and would not have thought to choose. Sometimes, Sally said, she picked them simply because she knew nothing about the author or the book, in the spirit of experimentation, which pleased Eve. She liked to think Sally was loosening up, letting go.
The gulf between Sally’s understanding of the world of books and Eve’s was too great for Eve to bridge, so she told herself she didn’t need to try. Instead, she settled into a diet of canal history and contemporary crime, which was perfectly satisfying and adequately filled the moments when there seemed to be nothing else to look at or think about or talk about or do. So she was not looking forward to reading the book Arthur had left them. It was a bit old and tatty, for a start. Not tatty like a secondhand paperback that she could imagine some casual reader enjoying while drinking coffee or waiting at a Tube stop. Arthur’s book had the look of something that had been through many hands, been held by many different types of people in different circumstances over years and years. The rough fabric of the cover seemed designed to trap the moisture and flakes of skin in a way a smooth, slippery paperback would not. She had noticed Sally fondling it as if it were an object giving more tactile pleasure than the other books she read, and this was exactly what made Eve reluctant to pick it up. Some of this may have been down to its association with Arthur. In the time he had been aboard, Eve had gone from seeing him as pathetic, gray and insignificant, to finding him challenging, almost powerful. But if she had recognized that her first impression, based on his appearance, was superficial and wrong, she could not rid herself of that physical perception of Arthur as someone not quite wholesome, not quite clean and fragrant.
Still, she knew Sally wanted her to read the book and, however boring, irritating or impenetrable it was, in addition to being a health hazard, read it she would. And she would form an opinion, because that was what Sally would expect.
It was the story of Owen Lucton, a successful, middle-aged accountant in the 1930s, who finds himself out of step with those closest to him. His son and his wife both have ambitions to be modern, to be up-to-date, to strive for material things, while Lucton values simplicity and tradition, but lacks the certainty to defy the people he has spent his life working to support. He goes out on a drive, in a new car—cars are one aspect of the twentieth century he appreciates—and makes a mistake, as a result of which the car sinks into a river, out of sight, and Lucton sees his chance for escape. Over the next few months, he tries out different ways of life, living incognito and hand to mouth to avoid being found by his family and the worthies of the town, who have put out a hue and cry to discover him or his body. He walks, he sleeps in barns, he labors on a farm, he plays cricket, and finally he washes up in a village where he finds he can be useful to a pair of elderly spinsters. He is needed and accepted. He lives simply, as he always wanted to do. But the women need money, urgently, and he has it, but can only access it by walking back out of his new life into his old. So this is what he decides he must do, sacrificing the happiness he has found for the well-being of the community he is living in.
When he goes through the doors of his house and his office, though, having slipped back into the life he knew, it is with a new-found confidence and a degree of satisfaction that here, he truly is someone. He has a position. Is respected. The book concludes on an optimistic note: it was good to leave, but there is pleasure in going back. The chains Mr. Lucton puts back on are not, after all, as onerous as he thought them before he left.
Eve would not have gone more than two or three pages into this book; would have thrown it aside as dealing with small, mannered people in a small, provincial world and one, moreover, long gone. But she had committed to reading it, so she worked her way through, wondering what it was that Arthur understood it to mean, respecting his own life. That it was good to escape but important to go back? Or that it would have been better if the escape had been forever, that Mr. Lucton had shaken off entirely the person he was for the first fifty years of his life and lived on into happy old age doing manual but satisfying jobs, playing a part in the life of the narrow community where he found himself, becoming an altogether more relaxed, more sociable, more contented, if poorer, man?
And then, Sally, what would she have thought of it? The position Mr. Lucton escaped from was very different from Sally’s own, yet similar at a domestic level. Although Duncan was clearly—Sally had been at pains to make this clear—a thoroughly nice man, a caring person who would never intentionally stand in the way of his wife’s happiness, he shared, in Eve’s opinion, something with Mr. Lucton’s family: a lack of imagination, of the ability to dream dreams beyond his workaday world. It was beyond him to understand what it was that Sally needed from life in addition to what she had (in fairness, Sally herself would admit she did not know either) and he therefore assumed she must be happy. He sat, Sally had told her, in the very center of his life, seeing everything as it radiated out from himself, while she felt perpetually on the edge, craning for a glimpse of what lay beyond. The ending of the book, Eve thought, must have made Sally contemplate her own circumstances. It must have made her wonder whether, if she were to decide on reaching the end of the journey that her next move should be back to Uxbridge, that would turn out to be as satisfying as Mr. Lucton’s return to North Bromwich had been.
Once she had thought all this through, Eve felt ready to discuss the book with Sally.
“What did you think?” she asked, and Sally began by saying everything Eve had thought about the dated, mannered tone of the book, its narrow and stereotyped range of characters and situations. “So
what’s good about it, then?” she asked. “Why is Arthur so keen on it?”
“What’s good about it is that it makes you think,” Sally said. “And it offers you a moral dilemma and the author leaves space for the reader to decide how to judge. ‘This is good,’ he seems to be saying, when Lucton escapes. ‘This is fun and mind-opening, it’s turning our hero into a better person.’ Then he says, ‘But look, going back to where he started—that has its compensations, too.’”
“I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a book in those sorts of terms,” Eve said. “How do you do it?”
“Reading a lot,” Sally said. “And taking an Open University degree in English literature. That helped.”
“I didn’t know you’d done that.”
“It was something I did for me. And it taught me how to make judgments. But I don’t know what the book’s appeal is to Arthur, to answer your other question. I’d have to know his story but I suspect he may see it as a sort of allegory, a story embodying a universal truth in a stylized way.”
“If you say so,” said Eve. “And what about you, what do you feel about it? Do you think of yourself as in the idyll for the moment but expecting to find there are compensations in being back where you started at the end? Or are you looking for ways to make the escape permanent? Have you found your equivalent of the idyllic village, or are you still looking?”
Sally laughed. “When I read it,” she said, “I was thinking of you. It seemed to fit your situation better than mine. You had a position and a responsible job and a reputation. You could be more use to the world if you went back and did what you were doing before. So I was wondering, all the time I was reading, whether you would read into it that that was the right thing to do.”
Eve stared at her. “But I thought it was about you!” she said. “You have a family, you’re settled, with people who need you and want you to be with them. I don’t. I don’t even have a job to go back to.”
The Narrowboat Summer Page 17