“You could find another.”
“Well, if I’m honest, I know I could. But no one will miss me if I never go back. If I invest my redundancy money in a boat and spend the rest of my life turning into Anastasia.”
They were both silent for a moment, then Sally said:
“It’s odd, isn’t it, that we each see the other’s situation as so different from our own. I wonder whether we’re right. I mean, I’m saying to you, ‘Look, you can do something significant and play a part in achieving things beyond the simply domestic and day-to-day.’”
“The next generation of hydraulic pumps, you mean.”
“Well, yes, but more than that. In helping create employment, prosperity. You could be part of something more complex and challenging than I have ever been. And in comparison, I think of myself as quite insignificant. Then you say to me, ‘You’re not insignificant because there are individuals who rely on you.’”
“That’s right. Real people, not pumps. You were central to your world, I was only a cog in mine.”
“Well,” said Sally. She picked the book up and stroked its nubbly cloth cover. “So now we’ve worked all that out, what does it mean to you?”
“It’s a story,” said Eve. “It’s a made-up piece of whimsy. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“I don’t see it like that.”
“Go on, then, what does it mean to you if you find it so full of meaning?”
“There’s no need to get cross,” Sally said. Eve thought both the phrase and the tone of voice were what Sally would have used to her children, to her husband, but she didn’t say so, and she was pleased rather than irritated by the thought. “It says to me that there has to be a very good reason for going back. And I haven’t found one.”
* * *
MALE VOICE: Owen Engineering.
EVE: Is that Owen?
MALE VOICE: No. Who is it?
EVE: He won’t know me. My name’s Eve Warburton and I’m phoning about a friend of his.
MALE VOICE: I’ll get him.
OWEN: Owen here. What friend?
EVE: Anastasia.
OWEN: Right. So you’re one of the women bringing me the Number One, is that it?
EVE: Yes.
OWEN: Where are you?
EVE: You sound like … never mind. We’re near Birmingham, at Bridge 78 on the Grand Union.
OWEN: Bridge 78? Let me see … what have you been doing? You should be closer than that by now.
EVE: Well, I’m sorry if you think we’re just drifting along as if tomorrow would do, but Anastasia said we had to be with you by August, and we will be.
OWEN: OK. Is that what you phoned to say? Anything wrong with the boat I need to know about? Any parts I ought to be ordering?
EVE: Not that I know of and no, it wasn’t why I was phoning. Anastasia asked us to let you know when she was going in for her operation.
OWEN: Hold on, hold on. This isn’t right. Anastasia asked you to tell me she was going into hospital? That doesn’t sound likely. And what operation is this?
EVE: No, all right, we asked her who we should tell, and she agreed we could tell you. She’s having an operation to remove a tumor from her lung. It’s next Thursday. Are you still there?
OWEN: Yes. I’m absorbing the information, is all.
EVE: Did you know she was ill?
OWEN: Well, of course I did. Why else would she ask a couple of amateurs to bring the Number One up here? I just didn’t imagine it would be serious. I’m used to her overcoming obstacles.
EVE: She may overcome this one.
OWEN: Did she say so?
EVE: No. She’s treating it as an experience, I would say. She is neither hopeful nor despairing.
OWEN: I can see that.
EVE: She agreed we could tell Arthur, too. She said you’d know how to get hold of him.
OWEN: Now I’m worried. She agreed to let Arthur know she’s going into hospital to get part of her lung removed next Thursday? Which hospital, are we allowed to know that?
EVE: Yes, it’s Hillingdon Hospital in Uxbridge.
OWEN: And what did she tell you to tell me and Arthur, exactly?
EVE: The date, the hospital, the fact that she was having an operation.
OWEN: But not what operation?
EVE: I don’t know. I’m not sure if that was prohibited.
OWEN (MUFFLED): Keep the fucking noise down, guys. I’m on the phone.
EVE: Is there anything more you want to know?
OWEN: Lots, but nothing you can tell me. Thank you for ringing, and for the information. I’m sorry if I sounded cross. I do want you to keep me up to date with anything you find out. Can I rely on you to do that?
EVE: Yes, you can. By the way, she did say no fuss, no grapes.
OWEN: I’ve known her a lot longer than you have and I can’t imagine what universe I would be living in if I thought she wanted either of those.
EVE: Goodbye, then.
Click.
6
Birmingham
THE NUMBER ONE AND Grimm traveled the length of the Birmingham suburbs, Grimm taking the lead. It was surprisingly peaceful. It would have been possible, Eve noted, to moor almost anywhere in this stretch, but she was pleased that they had stopped at Trompette’s command the previous afternoon. She had enjoyed the shopping and the cooking and the eating. She had made Sultan Reshat Pilavi, a pilaf with lamb meatballs that, Claudia told her, was on record in the archives of the Topkapi Palace. There was enough for Billy and Trompette but Sally had asked her not to invite them. So she hadn’t. After all, Sally had fallen into the canal trying to rescue her bike so it was the least she could do. The leftovers would keep for a couple of days, Sally said. Which was probably true but they managed to eat most of it, with a bottle of Turkish wine Eve had found for next to nothing in Aldi.
While Sally drove, Eve contemplated the Guide. The options available for traveling through Birmingham on the canals and out the other side in the direction they wanted to go were almost too complicated to grasp. For one thing, they had to use a different Guide, and it had taken them most of the trip so far to become used to the way the Guide they had used since Uxbridge moved from page to page—never in a logical direction and not always to a contiguous page. Trying to reconcile where they were with where they needed to end up (which was in a third Guide), avoiding taking the wrong turn at the multiple junctions they would pass, was going to be enough of a challenge without the added problem of having to choose beyond the city center (if they left it on the right canal) between the straight, newer canal and the older, more rambling one. Eve was lost in admiration for the men (they were all men—she had failed to uncover a hint of a feminine brain being engaged in the work) who had not only planned and executed this civil-engineering miracle in the first place but had then decided to create something better—straighter, shorter—going between the same two points. How was it that, when they could plan all this and carry it out, she seemed incapable of following the routes they had chosen on a perfectly reproduced, accurate, annotated, scaled map? It was because, she comforted herself, she did not have it all on a single sheet of paper. She had always liked plans on a page. She could see the big picture when the north, south, east and west of it were all apparent at once. On each of these pages (they joined the next Guide on page 63, left it to go to page 195, then exited to the next Guide from page 39) there was so much detail she was continually distracted. It was like the experience on the walk a few days ago. She had gone down and down and down until she was lost to sight at a single point on the map and Sally had lifted her head up and made sense of the whole thing. Eve wondered if there was a lesson here she might carry back into the way she approached her job, before remembering she no longer had a job. Might never have a job again, or not one where the ability to understand how to manipulate both the overall concept and the detail buried within it might be a requirement.
“Here,” she said to Sally. “You look at the wretched Guide. I�
��ll drive.”
* * *
There was a subterranean feel to the canal through Birmingham. High brick walls and a flight of locks that were submerged beneath railway bridges. In between there were stretches with trees, modern or modernized buildings, but Sally was left with the impression that the casual phrase for visiting a town—“going into”—was entirely accurate. As if the city was at a lower level than the one they had left and they were going down into it.
Trompette, at the tiller of Grimm ahead of them, was a strange contrast to the surroundings of graffiti, litter and abandonment, standing still and straight in one of her triangular-shaped dresses with her hair in a neat little scarf tied in a knot on top. The floating debris included balloons, bottles, cans, plastic bags and a dead duck. Trompette glanced aside at none of them. They came to a narrow bridge where a group of young people, children, turned from their studied idleness to call and point as Grimm nosed through the arch. One of them reached out a hand to grab the rail and pull himself aboard. Trompette, without appearing to notice, picked up a lock key with the hand not holding the tiller and swung it round slowly, like a ratchet. The youth stepped back. The level of noise—Sally was too far back to hear the words—increased, but apart from rude gestures they let Grimm pass.
Eve was standing on the rear deck with Sally. Though the group chose to ignore them, she could feel Eve’s tension as the arch of brick trapped their voices.
“I didn’t enjoy that,” she said. “Do you think they were dealing drugs?”
“No,” Sally said. “I think they were waiting to grow up and become perfectly ordinary.”
“Oh, really?” said Eve. “They looked unlikely to stay out of jail to me.”
“That’s because you’ve never had anything to do with teenagers,” Sally said. “If you had, you’d be able to recognize the difference between the drug dealers and the embryo adults.”
“I’d better stick close to you, then, while we’re in Birmingham,” Eve said. “So you can tell me when it’s time to panic.”
It was evening before they reached Aston Junction, where Grimm pulled in to a mooring. Sally steered the Number One in behind it.
* * *
Eve went to the post office to collect their post. She had had very little, until now, but she was hoping Jacob would have remembered his promise to send a cookery book, although she told herself he probably would not have done so. Sally was always pleased to receive her post because none of it was related to the boring business of operating bank accounts and household affairs. She had walked out of her life and left her husband to sort all that out. Eve did not know whether to be scornful or impressed.
The post office had a porch decorated with a miniature version of the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a folly that Eve contrasted with the purposeful beauty of all aspects of the architecture of the canals. Inside, she was irritated to discover she was not allowed to carry Sally’s post away with her, having nothing that identified her as a person with responsibility for doing so, but pleased to find her own bundle included a padded envelope, book-shaped. She wanted to go at once to a café she had noted on the way past, to sit surrounded by other people spending time with their friends, laptops, books, papers and phones.
But it would not be fair to Sally to give in to the impulse. They had agreed they could not leave Noah alone on the boat in the center of Birmingham. And Sally would be preparing lunch, slicing the bread, unwrapping the cheese, finding the pickle in the cupboard. She was planning an outing of her own later, with Trompette, to a wool shop, and would be relying on Eve to come straight back from her errand. So, much as she wanted to linger, Eve had to return. Maybe this, she thought, was what it would be like to be married. Knowing that every time you left the house, you had to run a check on the well-being of someone else before going, before deciding to stay out.
It was ridiculous to regret the loss of the chance to divert into a coffee shop for half an hour, and Eve did not regret it. But she looked out, on the rest of the walk back to the moorings, for other reasons she might have wanted to pause. She had never been into the art gallery, with its sizeable collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and she had always liked the bold, bright assertiveness of the style. She passed a particularly good busker playing a violin with feeling and verve, but could not loiter and listen. There was a table laden with leaflets opposing some outrage or other; she enjoyed a bit of outrage and it was possible she would have found this cause worth discussing, or arguing about.
Still, there was Jacob’s parcel to look forward to. And the bread and cheese. And the peace of the Number One when Sally had gone out with Trompette and she was left by herself, with Noah, and the possibilities of the city beyond the porthole, for later.
* * *
SALLY HAD LIVED ALL HER life in towns and yet she felt oppressed. The Number One was too flimsy a protection from the pressures of a city: the noise, the people, the dirt and litter. She was too exposed. She was not physically afraid; it was more the feeling of having too few clothes on in a public place, of having no walls to keep herself separate. Also, Noah was not happy. She was less concerned about Noah’s well-being than Eve would have been—he was only a dog, after all—but his restlessness contributed to her uneasiness, on her own behalf and on his.
She was relieved when Eve came back, and so, it seemed, was Noah. She left him, after lunch, curled up behind Eve’s legs as she sat in a chair reading the cookery book Jacob had sent her.
“You’re not supposed to read cookery books,” Sally said. “You refer to them.”
“Not this one,” said Eve. “Jacob says it’s worth reading for its own sake and not just for the recipes.”
“He’s probably wrong,” Sally said.
Trompette appeared in her dungarees and they set off for a shop that was farther away than Sally expected, although that might have been because they had to go by way of the post office. She collected a couple of letters from her children, who were communicating with her more formally and, in fact, more regularly now. They had not grasped, because she had not told them, that she could pick up emails and messages on her phone; instead they were treating her as if she had embarked on a long and hazardous navigation of some remote country. There was also a bulky envelope from Duncan. To begin with, he had written long letters she hardly read, so full of illogical circularity they made her feel giddy. Was it his fault? he asked. Why didn’t she say so, before, if it was? Had she ever loved him? Could he be blamed if she had married him without loving him? How was he supposed to know how she felt? Did she want him to apologize? Was it his fault? She had communicated with him briefly and calmly. She had told him where she was, what she was doing. She had described aspects of the view from a narrowboat. She had, every time, apologized for hurting him and stressed it was not his fault. Eventually he had begun to respond in kind: telling her what was going on in his life, letting her know the news from the piece of territory he still occupied. She began to remind him of the things she would have done if she still lived at 42 Beech Grove. She stuffed all her letters into her rucksack.
Trompette was an object of attention as they walked through the streets. Sally noticed people passing by noticing her, both men and women, young and old, following her with their eyes. Trompette, with her blue dungarees, her bare, brown arms, her head wrapped in a bright red-and-blue scarf tied in a bow on top of her head, with a huge tote bag over one shoulder in blocks of red, yellow, blue and black fabric, would have been interesting on the canal, but unsurprisingly so, as the canal was peopled and decorated with a range of the picturesque, the not-quite-normal and the colorful. Here, on the pavements of Birmingham, she was a rare enough creature to be watched and stared after. To which she was, or appeared to be, oblivious. Sally wondered if all these people thought she was Trompette’s mother and, if so, whether they thought she was failing to live up to so splendid a creature.
They reached the shop and the woman behind the counter, who was wearing a hand-knitted c
ardigan woollier than the temperature would suggest was necessary, came out and hugged Trompette. She submitted to being hugged, then introduced the woman as Misty, which Sally misheard as Miss Tee, but realized her mistake when she noticed the shop was called Misty’s Cave. At the back was a table covered in knitting-pattern books that Misty swept onto a chair with a wave of her stocking-stitched arm, to allow Trompette to empty her tote, which turned out to be full of pieces manufactured from wool: some toys, some clothes, some creations—flowers, cupcakes, random (but beautiful) shapes—which Sally would have thought had no connection with wool whatever. The conversation between the two women became technical.
“I can’t see any seams on this.”
“That’s because there aren’t any. I knitted it in one piece, with steeks.”
“I can’t tell. And this shawl?”
“Knitted from the top down with short row shaping.”
“Good stitch definition. The yarn is partly yak, if I remember right.”
Sally wandered round the racks and racks of different weights and colors and textures of wool, reaching out to touch the ones that looked particularly worth touching, picking up stray balls from the floor or counters and slotting them back in their place.
The effect of what were no more than bookcases with diagonal dividers splitting each cell into four, packed with wools, was both exciting and soothing. It was a display of missed opportunities. Because, like everything else in her life, she had thought knitting was something that needed to be done rather than something she wanted to do, she had stopped when she realized it was cheaper to buy the children sweaters than to knit them. She had only ever knitted with wool that was cheap, in colors and shapes suitable for school, it had been no hardship to stop. But here, in Misty’s Cave, she was transfixed by the beauty of the unknitted, and the knitted, as displayed in finished pieces and on the covers of pattern books. From this, she thought, putting a finger on an iridescent skein of fine russet yarn, to this, and she felt the edge of a lacy shawl. It had to be possible that the work to go from the one to the other was within her grasp and that she would enjoy doing it.
The Narrowboat Summer Page 18