The Narrowboat Summer

by Anne Youngson

  “Try as she might, she couldn’t always be there to collect me, so she made an arrangement with Ted’s family—I can’t remember anything about it except my classmate was called Ted and he lived in a house with a father in it, as well as a mother, and other children. I began to realize that this was more or less normal. That on a normal scale, my way of life was so far to one end as to be embarrassing, and I stopped being cross about going to school, because that put me in among normal people, but I began to build up a picture of an ideal life, and that was Ted’s, not mine.”

  “Then you moved into a house,” said Sally.

  “Yes.” Owen ran a grease-stained hand over his stubbly hair, down his face, then looked at his palm as if surprised to find it belonged to him. “What seems to be happening here,” he said, “is that I’m telling you my life story rather than Anastasia’s, and that is truly boring, believe me.”

  “Keep talking anyway,” said Eve.

  “Well. It was a pretty grim time. She sold the boat and got a job at a yard on the Shropshire Union, out in the countryside, and her employers provided the house. I was so angry with her. I wanted to live in a house in Birmingham, why couldn’t she understand that? And go to school with my friends. Of course, she hated it, too, but she didn’t point this out, and she didn’t tell me why she’d done it, why she hadn’t found a permanent mooring in Birmingham and taken whatever jobs were available on the bank. Or taken any other options that would have kept us living where we did. Later I found out that one of my teachers had alerted the authorities to what she thought was child neglect at best, abuse at worst. I was always hungry, but so were my friends, only I also had bruises. Never without them. Living on an unlit towpath has more hazards than the average house on the average street. Bingham Close,” he said, turning to smile at Sally.

  “Or Beech Grove,” she said, and he nodded.

  “Plus, there were more opportunities to have fun and I was an adventurous child. So the bruises were carelessness or stupidity, and I never thought about them, but to my teacher they looked sinister, and Anastasia had to cope with the Social Services inspecting the way she lived and looked after me. They concluded she was not in a position to care for me properly. So she stopped living the way she wanted to because she couldn’t run the risk I would be taken into care. And she moved out of the reach of the social workers.”

  “I can’t imagine a conversation between Anastasia and a social worker,” said Eve.

  “In fact, they were not unsympathetic, so she said, when she finally told me all this. But she would understand what you mean; she knew herself well enough to know that eventually she would lose patience and bark or even bite, and that would be that. Anyway, we niggled and snapped at one another for a couple of years, then I became a teenager, which I know is supposed to be the signal to start despising your parents, but I’d got that out of the way early and it was our best time. Anastasia bought the Number One from the yard where she worked. It was just a rusting hulk and we worked on it together, rebuilt the superstructure, kitted it out, bought, restored and fitted an engine. So when I left school and got an apprenticeship with British Waterways, as it was then, she could cast off and go back to being the person she wanted to be.”

  Sally wondered most, listening to this story, about how Anastasia, at the time and now in old age, saw Owen. As her greatest achievement, her greatest joy? Or as a source of compromise, when compromise was not in her nature. She hoped it was the joy and the achievement.

  “What about your father?” Eve asked. “Was he not around when you were growing up?”

  “I told you,” Owen said. “You’ll have to ask Anastasia about Arthur.”

  * * *

  ANASTASIA LOOKED BETTER. SHE WAS sitting in a chair and was dressed. She had no cannulas in her hands, though she was still connected to something draining fluid from her lungs, she told them, anticipating their questions about how she was by giving them a full update before they had spoken. There was a woman in the other bed in the ward, this time. She was much younger than Anastasia and looked frightened. She kept her head turned in Anastasia’s direction and tears occasionally rolled down her cheeks. Eve thought how strong Anastasia was, in comparison. She asked at once, before her courage deserted her, for Arthur’s story, but, like Owen, Anastasia suggested they hold on to their desire to know about the past until they had properly sewn up the immediate future.

  She was within a week of being discharged, she said. The two things holding it up were the drain, though she could leave with that in place, and her ability to do simple tasks—washing and dressing herself, moving from bed to chair, boiling a kettle. If there was someone at home to look after her, no hurdles remained and she could leave. Having explained this, Anastasia shut her eyes.

  “You don’t like the idea of being dependent on someone else,” said Sally.

  “No.”

  “But you don’t like the idea of staying here, either, so you will accept that it’s the way out of here,” said Eve.

  Anastasia opened her eyes. “Yes.”

  “Well then, we’ll sort it out,” said Eve.

  “How? You two are supposed to be bringing my boat back to me. There is only so much of Jacob’s time available, and even that is probably more time than I could bear to have him making a fuss.”

  “There are two of us,” said Sally. “And Trompette. Billy is in jail.”

  “Is he?” For a moment she looked like the Anastasia they had first met. “Convicted? On remand?”

  “On remand.”

  “I see. That might work. Yes, that might work. But what about Grimm?”

  “There are too many unknowns,” announced Eve. “So what we need to do is to fix a point, and then work out what we need to do to reach that fixed point and set about doing it.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” said Anastasia.

  “It means, we should say that you are leaving hospital in seven days’ time. Then we have seven days to put everything in place to make it possible.”

  “What if it isn’t possible?”

  “I’m surprised at you, Anastasia,” said Eve, “talking of failure. We of the Easy Team do not accept that failure is possible. Once we have made a decision to implement a plan, we go forward with confidence.”

  Anastasia began her barking, howling laugh but then stopped herself as, plainly, it hurt.

  “What a ridiculous woman you are,” she said.

  “I know,” said Eve.

  Anastasia looked over at the other bed and raised her voice.

  “I hope you realize I don’t know what she’s talking about either.” Then she sent them away. “Come back later,” she said. “I’m tired now.”

  On the way out, the other patient raised a hand and beckoned them over.

  “She’s what’s keeping me going,” she whispered.

  * * *

  When they came back, with more clothes and a collection of tubs with offerings of food from Jacob (“Don’t worry,” he said, “I have permission to send them!”), the other patient was surrounded by family who looked, if anything, more anxious than she did. Anastasia was in bed and they sat beside her, with the curtain half drawn and the lights of Hillingdon coming on as dusk fell, and she told them Arthur’s story. She told it without drama, without emotion. As unlike Billy as possible.

  Arthur had been, she said, and still was, a gifted musician. He had studied music and made a living out of music in one way or another. He tuned pianos, taught the piano, the flute and the clarinet. He sang folk songs with a group of friends and made enough money to live on or even, in the good months, more than enough. He was competitive, and there was always a chance he would have made a breakthrough, created a name for himself. He married his childhood sweetheart, a woman called Mimi, or whom Arthur called Mimi; Anastasia did not know if that was her real name. She was an artist in the same way Arthur was a musician; a woman of artistic talent, making a living by teaching, painting, working in a gallery, while waiting
for fame and fortune to strike. They had a child, a boy named Godfrey, who made little difference to their freelance, creative lifestyle. One or other of them would be at home, and when that wasn’t possible, Godfrey went with one or other of them to gigs or lessons or exhibitions or recording sessions.

  A golden life, as Anastasia described it.

  Then Godfrey died. He was six. He was ill one morning when both of them had somewhere they needed to be and they rearranged their day so that first one of them spent an hour or two at home, then the other one hurried back for a spell, and so on, through the day. By the time it became apparent that this was not a cold to be treated with love and cough mixture, but something much more serious, it was too late to save him and impossible to say which of them was most at fault.

  It destroyed them. Individually and as a couple. The guilt pushed them apart and the creativity that was at the core of who they were was implicated in the neglect that had resulted in the boy’s death, and they could find no comfort in it. They began to run out of money, having no reserves and not being able to go back to doing what had brought the money in. Arthur, hating failure, ran away. He packed a few belongings and hitched or caught buses or trains, traveling he had no idea where. He slept rough and busked for pennies to buy himself food. Until one day he came through a gap in a hedge onto the towpath of a canal and came face to face with Anastasia, moored up, trying to sort out a cargo of steel rods that had shifted and was making the boat hard to handle.

  They spent the next year together, plying for trade, using Arthur’s musical skills to supplement their income. When Anastasia became pregnant, she thought Arthur would run away again—and he did, but only for a day or two. He came back, prepared to try again, he told her, as a long-term partner and as a father. And so he might have done, had he not been recognized by an erstwhile neighbor from Uttoxeter. They were working their way through a lock at Stoke Bruerne when a woman eating an ice-cream cone, the ice cream sliding down the side as it melted in the heat, shouted his name and he looked up. Mimi, she told him, as he raised the paddles and opened the gates, had attempted suicide after he left. She had failed to kill herself but had succeeded in doing so much damage to her body and her brain that she was no longer able to look after herself. She had been taken in by her sister, a woman both she and Arthur hated, and it was only lack of opportunity and capacity that had prevented her from having another, more successful go at putting an end to her life. By the time the Number One left the lock, Arthur was forever trapped back in the marriage he thought he had escaped.

  Sally had murmured “Oh, no!” at the point in the story when the child died. Eve had recognized how unthinkable that would be, but she was not a mother. It was the fate of Mimi that moved her most, the idea of being utterly bereft and physically helpless. Anastasia paused at this point, too, as if she was relating the position of this woman none of them had met to her own future life.

  Arthur, Anastasia said, might appear irresponsible, because he was always trying to evade responsibility. This, though, was because he knew that, if he once recognized it, he could not escape it. He could not help himself. He was responsible for Mimi and it was impossible for him to stay in the life he and Anastasia had planned together. He went back to Uttoxeter and rescued Mimi. He trained as an accountant to be sure of having a job and an income to support her. Anastasia knew nothing, because Arthur had said nothing, about how he and Mimi existed together, what her state of health and state of mind now was, but whenever he could, he left Uttoxeter and fled back to the canals. He would find Anastasia and Owen, wherever they were, and slot back into their lives for a week or two, sometimes a month or six weeks, when Mimi was in hospital. Anastasia made it clear that he was not responsible for them, too, because she scorned the idea that she was anyone’s responsibility but her own.

  “He was the nearest thing to a husband you ever had,” said Eve, at the end.

  “I sometimes think he was the nearest thing to a child I ever had,” said Anastasia, and closed her eyes.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME SALLY GOT out of bed the next day, Eve had a list of what needed to be done, at the top of which was contacting the hospital and confirming Anastasia’s release date, with any particular care needs they might recommend. Second on the list was buying a car, third was talking to Jacob, fourth was talking to Trompette. Sally, munching some stale muesli, reflected that though she had spent her life pottering about and Eve had spent hers sitting at a desk, it was Eve who was the doer. Eve might not be as ready as she was to wipe up a spill, collect dirty plates, load the washing machine, clean the windows, but when some activity that required determination was involved, Sally was the idle dreamer while Eve was the motivating force. In the past, Sally would have been irritated by Eve, but she had learned so much, about herself as well as Eve, that recognizing this only made her fonder of this large, forceful woman.

  Sally offered to accomplish task number four, and rang Trompette, who had that morning arrived, it turned out, at Owen’s yard.

  “I thought you’d be here,” Trompette said.

  “Is there room for me on Grimm?”

  “There is. Yes, there is.”

  “Then I’ll come back.”

  Eve endorsed this decision, and in the middle of the afternoon Sally walked out of Chester station to find Owen’s van, and Owen in it, waiting for her.

  “She gets on with it,” he said, when she told him what Eve was doing to put everything in place for Anastasia to come out of hospital. “Good person to have around. If you can put up with her.”

  “I can put up with her,” said Sally.

  “Yes. Two reasons: one, you’re a naturally nice person; two, she doesn’t see you as a threat or a challenge.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Exactly. She can afford to be nice to you because you are too nice to imagine being a threat or a challenge.”

  When they arrived at the yard, Sally held her arms out and Trompette walked right into them, leaned the whole length of her young, firm body against Sally.

  “I’m glad you’ve come,” she said at length, and pulled away to lead Sally onto Grimm.

  Sally had been apprehensive about this moment, not helped by Eve. “It’ll be sordid,” she said. “Be prepared.”

  It was not sordid. It was designed with the sleeping areas at the rear and the kitchen at the front, the reverse of the Number One’s layout. At the bottom of the steps down from the rear deck was a cabin with two upholstered benches, one either side of the gangway. At night, these could be pushed together and made up as a double bed. On one was a pile of bedding, neatly stacked. Everything else in the space was equally tidy, Sally realized, when she had overcome the shock of how much stuff there was, in contrast to the austerity of the Number One. Boxes were lined up underneath the bunks; a sewing machine sat on a shelf across the end wall; a wire ran above one of the beds from which hung garments, on hangers, many of them the sort of thing Trompette had sold to Misty of Misty’s Cave in Birmingham, some of them Trompette’s own. They moved slightly in the breeze from the open hatch, a forest of shapes, colors and textures that made Sally think of seaweed fronds in a rock pool. The floor, the bedding, the windows and the clothes were scrupulously clean. Sally was aware that Trompette was watching her; she, too, must have been apprehensive about this moment.

  “Trompette’s cave,” Sally said. “It’s lovely.”

  The shower and loo came next and then another cabin that was a closer match for Sally’s fears. It also had two benches and was full of stuff that was obviously Billy’s: musical instruments, strange and unsettling objects wrought in metal or woven from string, black plastic boxes with wires wrapped round them, piles of clothes and unsavory blankets and rugs. But this cabin, too, was clean, and Trompette had piled up Billy’s belongings as neatly as the quantity of awkward items allowed.

  “Billy’s cave?” Sally said.

  “Billy’s things,” Trompette said. “I tidied u
p. Usually, I can’t. He won’t like that I have. But I like it.”

  The kitchen, after this, was unsurprising. Clean, tidy but with an excess of things that Anastasia would be horrified to see. A table was fixed against the wall with a bench either side. On the table was a square parcel wrapped in tissue paper.

  “This is for you,” Trompette said, placing a finger on it.

  Sally sat down on a bench and drew the parcel toward her. The tissue paper had been shaped into a sort of envelope which was formed without the use of sticky tape. Sally undid the folds carefully, avoiding tearing the paper. She was enjoying the perfection of the package as much as she was looking forward to the contents. At last it opened enough for her to be able to glimpse the blues, greens and scarlet of the piece of knitting Trompette had been doing when they moored near Birmingham. She was speechless with admiration for the beauty of the thing Trompette had created. The kimono-style jacket hung in elegant folds if held still but, at the slightest movement, shifted to reveal a flash of color, a perfect curve, then fell again into its natural shape.

  “Oh, Trompette,” Sally said.

  “Put it on.”

  Sally was wearing a T-shirt and jeans and assumed the cardigan would look incongruous with so ordinary an outfit, but when she had stood for Trompette to smooth and twitch and pronounce it all right, she was allowed to go back to the shower where there was a full-length mirror, and found out she was wrong.

  “I love it,” she said to Trompette. “But I said I’d buy it. How much do you want?”

  For the first time, Trompette looked like the child she so nearly was. “Why do you have to spoil it?” Her face became red and petulant and she squeezed her hands into fists. “It’s for you. It’s a present. I did it for you.”