The Narrowboat Summer

by Anne Youngson

  Beside the first lock they came to was a set of buildings, all neatly restored.

  “I could fancy living somewhere like this,” Eve said, as they waited for the lock to fill again to take the next boat in the queue down.

  “Abandon the town?” said Sally. “Could you?”

  “Oh, Sally, I still don’t know. Are you any closer to deciding what to do next?”

  “I’m clear about what I don’t want.”

  “Actually, I am too. That’s progress, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the one essential thing.”

  “You’re right.”

  Between the two sets of locks was the town of Market Drayton and they gave in to the lure of a table under a parasol and a cold beer in the garden of a pub, to food brought to them on a plate.

  “So what don’t you want?” asked Sally.

  “You first.”

  “That’s easy. Going back to live with Duncan at 42 Beech Grove. Even if he wanted me back, which I can’t assume he does. Now you.”

  “Going back to work for Rambusch—which isn’t a possibility, of course, because they don’t want me—or any company like Rambusch. I don’t want a big, corporate job which fills hours and hours of every day with the housekeeping involved in a large organization—the staff meetings, the policies and procedures, the briefings, the conferences. Do you know, I can’t believe I stuck it for so long. Never again. If I’m going back to work, I want to be doing the job, not talking about doing the job, discussing how the job is being done, proving I’m doing the job properly. Never again.” She raised her glass and chinked it against Sally’s. “Not now I know what it’s like to have discretion over how to use my time. That probably means contract work. Let’s face it, it’s necessary to earn a living, but it would be good to have gaps in between. And something worth doing in the gaps.”

  “Define worth doing,” said Sally.

  “I can’t,” said Eve. “Do you know what’s just come into my mind? A theory I came across once when we worried we weren’t being innovative enough to stay competitive. I did a bit of work on innovation—what it is, where it comes from—and I found this theory about the border between chaos and order. If I had a pencil and some paper I’d draw a picture, but you’ll just have to concentrate. On one side is everything we know and understand; everything that’s been invented or thought up, and there are loads of little dots, all perfectly distinct and nicely lined up. On the other side is a soup of possibilities so far from the known order of things we can’t possibly grasp them. This is a solid mass of overlapping dots. But where order meets chaos are the possibilities that are beginning to coalesce out of the soup, where we can just about recognize them, where we can begin to pick out patterns and certainties and there is a chance, in the right circumstances, with the right type of mind applied to them, that there can be a breakthrough. Another layer of order added to our known world.”

  “I like that,” said Sally.

  “So did I,” said Eve. “Actually, one of our design engineers told me years later, after everyone else had forgotten I’d ever shared this with them, that he had applied this thinking to a problem he was working on and had come up with an innovative solution as a result. But I’d forgotten it myself until now. Do you think that’s where we are? On the border between order and chaos?”

  “I do. We’ve both rejected parts of what has been our world order, and we’re trying to make sense of the margins of the soup of unknowns, where there’s a crust forming.”

  “Exactly. So I don’t think we should be in a rush to define what’s worth doing, do you? We don’t want to risk imposing some framework on the borders of chaos that might eliminate the possibilities and leave us with only the same answers as we had before. My word, I feel really pleased with myself for having thought all that through.”

  “Have you just argued that not having a clue what we’re going to do when Anastasia wants her boat back is the perfect situation to be in?”

  “Yes. Aren’t I clever?”

  “I can see you were an asset in your last job.”

  * * *

  While Sally took the Number One on toward the next set of locks, Eve cycled round the town in search of ingredients for an evening meal. Once they’d finally moored up that evening, she cooked with the same care and attention to detail, Sally noticed, as if it were not late, they were not both tired and hungry. She herself, she knew, would have skipped a stage or thrown everything in at the same time, in order to get to the end quicker. In order to satisfy the appetite of whoever was waiting for the food. In order not to waste their time. And yet, when it was her appetite waiting to be satisfied, she recognized it didn’t matter. All her rush to please people in the past—that had not been worth it.

  They went to bed late and worn out, and now it was morning. The Number One was moored between two bridges, no roads or railways within earshot, and the sun was sparkling off the canal, creating dancing patterns of light on the cabin ceiling. Promising a warm day to look forward to being on the canal. Except today would be different, might turn out to be less of a pleasure. Eve was getting ready to walk into the nearest village to meet the taxi she had ordered to take her to the station to go to a funeral. While Sally was left with the Number One and Noah and a wait for help to arrive from Owen’s yard to take her up the next set of locks. She did not know how long the wait or who the helper would be. And she was in no hurry. When she had seen Eve off, she would move the boat up to just before the top lock in the flight, and enjoy the time she had to be idle before something else happened.

  * * *

  SALLY SAT WAITING ON THE rear deck. She began to study her hands, which, she had suddenly noticed, were not the hands she recognized. They were browner, decorated with small cuts and scratches healing and just healed; her nails were ragged; the little pleats of skin at the knuckles were deeper. They were the hands of someone whose life was not empty. She was pleased with them.

  She looked up. A bonfire was burning on the other side of the hedge and the smoke was drifting over the towpath. There was someone walking toward her; the smoke made the figure insubstantial, and yet something about the way it moved was familiar. When the man walking toward her now had passed through the smoke and emerged into the sunlight, he was a complete stranger.

  He stopped beside her. “Owen,” he said.

  Caught by surprise—she had been expecting him to walk on past—she repeated his name, then, recollecting herself, gave him hers.

  “I guessed,” he said. “Shall we go? The lock’s set.”

  He put a hand on the rail and she moved aside to leave him room to come aboard and take possession of the tiller. She had assumed, without being conscious of having assumed it, that whoever came to help her would take charge and that she would be relegated to the position of crew. She would be operating the paddles; he would be driving the boat. But she was wrong: Owen was only steadying himself while he lifted the fender. As soon as he’d untied the ropes, he left her to start the engine and take the Number One through the lock. She concentrated on achieving this without touching the side, even though Owen, leaning against the beam of the gate, ready to shut it behind her, had his back to her.

  Sally continued to watch him as he went from side to side, closing the gates, operating the paddles, as he leaned on the bottom gate watching the water level in the lock dropping, and she could not see what it was about him that had felt familiar. He was an unremarkable-looking man. But there was an ease and power about the way he moved and carried out the tasks which was pleasing and, in truth, comforting. Sally substituted the figure of Duncan (another unremarkable-looking man) for Owen’s and knew at once what level of anxiety she would feel if it was her husband who was working his way around the lock sides above her. Even had he known what he was doing, she would be waiting for him to start talking to a passerby, forgetting some essential move, or taking some shortcut in the process, claiming as better or quicker something that would put one or both of them, or the
boat, at risk.

  Owen did talk to passersby, but briefly, never diverting his attention from the state of the lock. He did have ways of doing things that were different from the ways that Anastasia had taught Eve and Sally, but Sally felt safe. She relaxed; she drove the boat perfectly, in full control. If Owen was watching out for her, checking to make sure she did not need any help, it was not obvious. And she no longer had to be responsible for Noah. The dog had been ecstatic at Owen’s arrival, which Owen reciprocated by informing him that he was an atrocious dog, possibly good for only one thing, but no one had worked out what that one thing was. After this, for as long as Owen was with them, Noah ignored Sally, much as he had done when Eve was on the boat. She’d been demoted to fourth place in his affections.

  After the first eight of the flight of fifteen, they swapped over. Sally strode ahead and engaged in the usual conversations with other boaters—Where have you come from? Where are you headed? Have you heard there are problems on the Llangollen locks? Do you know where the next water point is? Isn’t it a lovely day?… The inexperienced boaters were always keen to share their lack of experience. Listening to a woman from Wolverhampton explaining her total inability to grasp how a lock worked, Sally remembered that she had done this, too, that first week. Apologized for being useless. She had never felt less like apologizing or less useless in her life than now, working her way down the Audlem flight.

  They tied up outside a pub ahead of the last two locks and sat at a table at the end of the terrace where there was shade from overhanging trees and less noise. This seemed to have been accomplished with an astonishing absence of words but no misunderstanding.

  “Shall we?” Owen said, nodding toward the pub.

  “Yes,” said Sally.

  They sat for a while in silence. Sally could think of a number of things she would have liked to ask but was in no hurry to ask them. Owen was in no hurry either, but he was the one who spoke first.

  “Anastasia talked about this spot,” he said. “In hospital.”

  Sally looked round, taking in the sheltering trees, the moored boats, a family with a toddler toddling down the towpath, the lock gates opening to let through a hire cruiser with too many people on board, all holding cans of beer, and a collie sniffing at the base of a tree.

  “It has everything,” she said.

  “Precisely. She was imagining herself being here, rather than where she is.”

  “I remember now. Eve said.”

  Sally watched the clumsy maneuvering of the boat that had just left the lock. She became aware that Owen was watching her and turned back, caught his eye. He smiled. Like his gait, his smile had familiar echoes.

  “It’s a curious thing to have done,” he said. “Leaving your home for a matter of months to take a complete stranger’s boat to Chester and back. When you hadn’t been on a boat before. Have I got that right?”

  “Almost. I didn’t leave my home to travel with the Number One. I left my home because I wanted to leave it. Actually, I wanted to leave my marriage. I think if my husband had moved out I might have stayed where I was. But I realize now I didn’t want a life lived in Beech Grove.”

  “No beeches, I imagine.”

  “No beeches, no grove. There was never a precise moment when I recognized that everything about my life was wrong, and made up my mind to walk out on it, but one of the defining moments was about just that: beeches and groves. I work as a classroom assistant and we took the children for a day out in the country, with sheets of things for them to identify—birds and insects and plants and so on. They had to tick the box and color in the drawing. One of the things they had to find was an oak leaf, and they were all picking up leaves at random and shouting, ‘Miss, Miss, is this an oak leaf?’ One of the teachers was an expert—or she knew more than me, anyway—and she kept saying, ‘No, that’s a beech leaf, and that’s another one. You’re all looking in the wrong part of the wood.’ I suddenly realized that I was in a beech wood, a not particularly big beech wood so, technically, a grove, and it was endlessly calm, even with the children in it, and beautiful and altogether natural. I imagined the view, standing at the kitchen sink in the house I lived in, in the capital B, capital G Beech Grove, where all I would be able to see would be the top of next door’s whirligig washing line poking up above the fence panels between our garden and theirs.”

  “I can imagine,” said Owen.

  “Can you? For all I know, you may live in Cherry Tree Crescent and love every blade of grass in every lawn.”

  “I live on a narrowboat.”

  “Of course you do.”

  Owen laughed. “I’ve been temporarily living on a narrowboat for fifteen years. Before that I lived in Bingham Close, which was named after some local worthy. No one remembers who he was, but he is doomed to be remembered forever as a cul-de-sac. I moved out for the same reason you said you did. Not the lack of woods and trees, but because I did not want to be married anymore. I didn’t feel quite myself, in my marriage.”

  “All of a sudden?”

  “No, from the start. Growing up, I thought it was all I wanted: a house something like the one in Bingham Close, a wife who was reliably there every night, every morning. I wanted to be having the conversations I heard in the houses of other boys, about where to go on holiday, about whose turn it was to take the bins out, about whether to cut down this or that shrub in the garden. And then, when I had it, I couldn’t see the point in it.”

  “I take it you didn’t grow up in a house where those sorts of conversations happened?”

  “I didn’t grow up in a house at all, to begin with. When I was about ten, I think, we moved off the boat into a house, so I could go to the same school every term, but we were never like other families, my mother and I.”

  “You lived on a boat as a child?”

  “I was born on one.”

  “Not,” said Sally, suddenly understanding who it was that Owen called to mind, “the Number One?”

  “No. Anastasia acquired that when living on the bank became too much for her.”

  “Anastasia is your mother.”

  “Yes.”

  Sally felt momentarily winded. She almost said: “But she can’t be,” so hard was it to imagine Anastasia as anyone’s mother. But she stopped herself.

  “Well. Have you met Jacob?”

  “I have.”

  “He told us he wondered what it would be like to have Anastasia as a mother. He said he thought it would be terrifying but you would end up properly buffed up. That might not have been the word he used, but you can understand what he meant.”

  “I can, but he was wrong. It was only terrifying in its uncertainty. Where she was going to take us to next, what she would say to the people I thought of as normal people. And she didn’t buff me up. I think she felt wary of having too much influence on me, so she erred on the side of having too little. None of this is an excuse for having turned out to be an unsatisfactory husband. I just misunderstood what I wanted.”

  “I did, too. I have no excuse. I grew up in exactly the household you describe, all certainty about what would happen on any day, at any hour. Talking about the bins or the drains or the Gower Peninsula. And I don’t even think I thought about whether or not I wanted my life to be the same. It just seemed to be what there was. So I was an unsatisfactory wife. Actually, my husband may not have realized that yet; I’m hoping he will. But it’s true what you say: I couldn’t see the point of the life I was leading, after the children left.”

  “I didn’t have any children, and my wife didn’t think I was unsatisfactory, either, when I went. She recognizes it now.”

  “Well,” said Sally. “So here we are, the happily unmarried.”

  Owen lifted his glass, chinked it against hers. “To us,” he said.

  * * *

  They went down a couple of locks in a staircase, one emptying into the next. There was room for two boats in each, side by side, and a couple of middle-aged men in hi-vis jackets wor
king the gates and the paddles and maneuvering boats from side to side so that the maximum capacity was reached, the minimum amount of water lost. Watching this from the vertiginous heights of the top lock, keeping the Number One close to the edge, central between the gates, Sally noticed the people on the other boats taking photos of the old buildings alongside, of the view from the top, of the bridge at the bottom over which occasional cars passed, suspended for a moment above the boats traveling at right angles beneath them. She and Eve had taken no photos and it suddenly struck her as odd. On holidays and days out and special occasions, she had never missed capturing a moment or two: a landscape, a place where they had stayed, smiling faces round a table. But taking photos as they traveled in the Number One was as unlikely as taking photos at her kitchen sink. This was not a holiday. It was life, going on in unrecorded moments.

  Sally offered to take a picture of the couple on the boat beside her in the lock, both of them smiling, leaning against the tiller and one another. Before all this was over, she thought, she might ask someone to take that same picture of her and Eve. Together on the Number One. That one photo was all she would need. Not endless snaps of one more stretch of water reaching toward one more bend, one more black-and-white lock gate, one more view of countryside and distant hills, another duck or swan or moorhen paddling up, hoping to be fed. She would never lose the image of those things, however many years passed without further sight of them. But a picture of herself, as she was now, and of Eve, with one hand on the tiller—she might need that as a reminder of what this trip had been.

  While Sally managed the boat down the staircase, Owen joined the men on the side, chatting, lending a hand. Another man strolled past and stopped, had a word or two. These were not random encounters with strangers, Sally realized. This was a community of people connected, in one way or another, with the canals. Known to each other, even if meetings such as this were occasional and occurred by chance. It was a community rooted in a geography that was defined by its distance end to end rather than by boundaries round a fixed center.