The Narrowboat Summer

by Anne Youngson

  Sally took one of the balled-up hands.

  “I’d much rather have it as a present,” she said. “It makes it so much more special to me. I just didn’t want to assume.”

  Trompette pulled her hand away, composing herself once more into her normal, controlled manner.

  “It suits you,” she said. “I knew it would.”

  When Sally went into the shed to see the Number One, out of its element but monumental in elevation on a cradle, Owen thought so, too.

  “My word,” he said, removing his gauntlets and his goggles, and touching the fabric, “that suits you.”

  That night, snuggled up on the benches in the rear cabin, in the dark, Trompette told her what had happened in Birmingham. In the early hours of the morning, they had set off after Thad and moored alongside him. He and Billy went out together and Trompette went to bed. She was woken in the night by Billy clearing all the hiding places of drugs and telling her he was sorry. Thad was dead, he said, killed in a fight with whichever gang had come off worst the night before. He was going. There was nothing she knew, or had on board, to implicate her in the crimes that had been committed. The next time she saw him was in prison.

  Grimm, and Trompette, had been thoroughly gone over by the police. In the end, she had most difficulty convincing them she was over eighteen, but once they had accepted that, they left her alone. She had spoken to the lawyer appointed to represent Billy. He would be in jail for a number of years, if found guilty. The lawyer was noncommittal on his chances of being found not guilty. Like herself, Eve and Anastasia, Sally thought, Trompette was suddenly in a position of having her way of life tugged out from under her. Only, unlike them, she had most of life ahead of her and no resources. But despite this, or maybe because of it, once she had told her story, Trompette dropped off into a deep and apparently undisturbed sleep.

  * * *

  Eve arrived at the yard in a car she had bought, and which Owen seemed to think was a good buy. By this time, Sally and Owen had planned their route back to Uxbridge with the Number One, and timed it at three weeks. They used the map Anastasia had pinned up on the wall and used the hours’ travel time it gave them for each section.

  “It’ll be wrong,” Owen said. “But not that far wrong.”

  Via Middlewich, Stoke-on-Trent, Great Haywood, Fradley, Tamworth and then Braunston; from there, they would follow the same route they had used on the way up. It was 200 miles and there were 189 locks. The last piece of planning—who would be staying with Anastasia—they left until Eve arrived. Sally had assumed Trompette would leave Grimm at Owen’s yard, travel at once to Uxbridge and be there until she and Eve got back with the Number One. But neither Trompette nor Owen thought this was a good idea. Trompette wanted to keep close by the only home she had, and Owen was reluctant to let Grimm occupy space he could be using for people who would pay him. So both boats would be making the journey, in tandem. Only one person per boat, Owen pointed out, was strictly necessary in a convoy, and they could take turns to spend time in the flat.

  Eve agreed. They should take it in turns, she said, to look after a woman who would undoubtedly be grumpy and rude and uncooperative. Owen announced his intention of going down the next day to extract Anastasia from the hospital and install her in the flat. He could spare three days, he said.

  “Are you sure?” asked Sally.

  “Yes,” Owen said. “Technically, she is my responsibility. And practically, she is more likely to do what I tell her.”

  It was a relief to Sally to go to bed in her own narrow little berth on the Number One, back in the water with every chip and scratch painted over. Although in theory she’d had a bed to herself on Grimm, Trompette had had a tendency to shuffle her half of the double across and snuggle up. Sally had felt short of sleep, and breathing space, and oppressed by the profusion of things.

  9

  To Uxbridge

  BY THE SECOND DAY, they were on the Middlewich Branch, which linked the Shropshire Union to the Trent and Mersey. Eve concentrated on the experience of traveling. The rhythm of movement along a canal, the tramp of feet on the towpath like a song without notes. This was not about the destination; the point was the traveling, at a speed that allowed change to occur at the rate of one hundred yards every minute. Or less frequently. When the boat was stationary, change occurred only as the wind blew and shifted the pattern on the water’s surface. She’d never noticed this before. She had never noticed how many unexplored paths there were leading off from the canal, visible only as a footpath sign, a short stretch of lane crossing a bridge and plunging at once round a bend and out of sight.

  She pointed this out to Sally, perched beside her, wearing the remarkable cardigan.

  “Would it be fanciful to say I am noticing this now because we are so close to having to choose which path to take?”

  “Of course not,” said Sally. “And if it is, you go ahead and be fanciful.”

  “Unfortunately, we don’t have any data to tell us which path is worth exploring,” Eve said. “If only we had time to stop and explore.”

  “That’s more like it,” said Sally. “Keep a grip on the facts.”

  They passed a cluster of buildings, alone in a clearing, close to the canal’s edge. A square house, a line of what could have been stables or storage sheds, all built of brick and looking as if they had been only recently abandoned; the house surrounded by cultivated plants untended and overgrown; the sheds with a window broken here and there but a pile of logs stacked neatly beneath a tarpaulin not yet shredded by the wind.

  “Look, look!” said Eve. “Wouldn’t that be a project? Think what we could do with that—tidy it up, offer moorings, a café, B&B, day trips—what do you think?”

  She had throttled back to give herself more time to look and the boat was drifting in the wind.

  “I think you’re at risk of running aground,” Sally said. “And who do you mean by ‘we’?”

  “I don’t know. It just looks like more than a one-woman project.”

  They had drifted past now and, as Sally had predicted, when Eve opened the throttle and tried to move forward, the Number One was caught in shallow water on a patch of reeds. It took them ten minutes with the pole and much maneuvering to regain the central channel. Trompette, on Grimm behind them, held back throughout, keeping her boat neatly central between the banks. She made no effort to come closer and help.

  “I’m glad she’s your project, not mine,” Eve said. “Or don’t you think she’s a problem?”

  “She is, but not your kind of problem. You like problems that can be sorted out by the application of logic and by taking the right steps. I’m not sure what the answer is, for Trompette, but I’m not looking for a fix, just to make a difference.”

  “Lucky for her she found you,” said Eve.

  “I wasn’t criticizing you.”

  “I know. And I wasn’t being sarcastic.”

  * * *

  They started early each day and traveled on into the evening, aiming to reach Kidsgrove by lunchtime on the third day when they were due to meet Owen. There was a series of locks called, so the book (and a chatty fellow sitting with his dog on a lock gate) told them, Heartbreak Hill. There were eighteen locks in a four-mile stretch, and although the map showed these as double, they were two individual locks, side by side, so it was twice the work for whoever was not driving, operating two locks at once.

  They dished up the remains of such food as they had on board because Owen was in a hurry to get back to the yard and Eve needed to set off for Uxbridge to relieve Jacob before Anastasia became too acidic for even Jacob’s sunny nature to bear.

  “She’s at that moment when she’s been thinking, ‘Thank heavens that’s over,’ and then she realizes that of course it isn’t. Now she’s faced with the beginning of what comes afterward. If you know what I mean.”

  Sally and Eve both did.

  “You mean,” said Trompette, “when Billy’s trial is finally over and he gets co
nvicted, it won’t be the end. It will be the beginning.” She lifted the hem of the smock she was wearing and wiped her eyes. “Poor Anastasia. She won’t know how to be anyone except the person she always has been.”

  “She’ll cope,” said Owen. “You will, too, Trompette.”

  * * *

  There was somewhere Sally needed to be the next day, but first they had to go through the Harecastle Tunnel. Nearly as long as the Blisworth Tunnel, but only one boat’s width and low enough that hard hats were recommended. There was a convoy system in operation, and they were given a safety briefing before setting off. If this had been her first experience of tunnels, Sally thought, as she set off in front with the Number One, she would have been comforted by the impression that they were not alone or having to create their own rules; but once she was inside, it was considerably more frightening than Blisworth. It was not so much a tunnel as a sewer, so low was the roof, so close the side walls. At first, she was shrouded in a fog of fumes from the boat in front, which was an unhelpful reminder of the story Billy had told about the Blisworth, but then, with the convoy inside, the ventilation fans started up with a noise like a tumble dryer. Sally concentrated on maintaining the gap between herself and the boat in front, as directed, and on ducking to avoid the bright painted arches that were the lowest point, and on thinking of nothing but these two tasks.

  She looked back when she had cleared the entrance to check on Grimm. Trompette was wearing something white and tent-like, and as she neared the mouth of the tunnel, Grimm and its helmsman could have been a thing of horror, not wholly real nor insubstantial enough to be dismissed as a dream. Out in the open, Trompette peeled off her cape and was as neat, as unmoved as ever.

  * * *

  SALLY WOKE UP MISSING DUNCAN for the first time since she left 42 Beech Grove. The absence of the person she had lived so closely with for more than twenty years was suddenly so obvious she was surprised she had not felt it before. How could she have gone from knowing everything—which shirt he would be wearing next day, whether the patch of eczema on his wrist had flared up, what he would be eating tonight—to a complete absence of knowledge, and not felt the gap?

  Noah sniffled and she remembered her responsibility, in Eve’s absence, for the animal. She thought, as she pulled on her jeans, that she had woken aware of a lack of Duncan because she had been dreaming about him. And she had been dreaming about him because she was about to see him. He was coming to visit her on the Number One. By invitation.

  Sally remembered Lynne the hairdresser’s reaction to the news she was separating herself from Duncan, her expectation that there would be emotional fallout. There had been very little strong emotion in her marriage, she thought, looking back, but that didn’t mean Duncan would be accepting the new situation with the sense of liberation she was experiencing. The gap she had left behind could be an abyss, for all she knew. She suspected it was not like that; nothing Duncan had said or written since she’d left led her to believe he was finding it hard to cope, and the idea of Duncan in despair, looking at the washing line and wondering where there might be a sturdy enough hook or beam more than six foot off the ground, was enough to make her smile. Which she should definitely not be doing. To have given him even a day or a week of misery was something she had to regret, even if, as she so fervently hoped, he would find out soon enough that this was not the end of something wonderful but rather the start of something potentially better.

  She sorted Noah out. She appreciated his tolerance of her, fourth best as she clearly was to Anastasia, Eve and Owen, and was tolerant in return. After breakfast with Trompette, who had agreed to keep Grimm moored a little distance away and to stay out of sight, she walked up to the turnoff on the road over the canal, where she had told Duncan to park. She took a book. Sat on the grass and opened it up. Her phone beeped. He had sent her a text message telling her when the satnav estimated he would arrive. She shut her eyes and wriggled her back against the tree supplying her with shade.

  There were no more texts, so she guessed the satnav had been accurate. She was standing in shadow and was able to watch Duncan drive up, turn the engine off and open the door without him noticing her. She stepped forward, as he stood up, phone in hand.

  “Hello there,” she said, and he jumped.

  “I didn’t see you,” he said. He looked up and down the road, on which no buildings were visible as far as the bends at either end. “How long have you been waiting? You shouldn’t stand around in turnoffs, you know. You’re making yourself vulnerable.”

  “Oh, Duncan,” she said.

  She had worried about how the greeting would go. Should she kiss him, expect him to kiss her? But this exchange had allowed them to be into a post-greeting place without a stumble.

  “This way,” she said.

  She tried to see the canal, the boat, the situation, as Duncan was seeing it, thinking how he would describe it, later, to whomever he was talking to in her absence. Of one thing she was sure: he would be talking to someone.

  The boat looked sparse. Although it was clean, the sunlight falling through the portholes onto worn, scuffed surfaces made it look dingy. Duncan was neither tall nor particularly fat, but filled the space in the cabin as he stood waiting for her to tell him where to sit.

  Then Noah wriggled past Sally’s legs and displayed some pleasure at the sight of Duncan. Duncan had always responded positively to other people’s dogs but the question of owning one had never arisen. Because of her, she realized now.

  “Where’s, um, what’s-her-name?” Duncan asked.

  “Eve. She’s back in Uxbridge, looking after Anastasia.”

  “That’s the boat’s owner, right? Strange name, Anastasia. Is it Russian, do you know?”

  “Not so far as I’m aware. I’ve never asked.”

  She made them coffee, while Duncan looked around, opening doors, pulling down flaps, commenting on what was neat, what was missing, what he would think about doing with the space if it was his boat.

  “I can’t imagine you wanting to live on a boat,” she said at last.

  “No, I wouldn’t. But do you? And if not, where do you want to live? Isn’t that what we’re here to discuss?” He said this as if she had been the one who had failed to approach the topic in a straightforward, businesslike way. It was curious, how exactly like himself he was, how not one of the things he had said since switching off his car’s engine in the turnoff had struck her as being unexpected. Which, after all, was not surprising. They had been together half their lives. The difference was not in him but in her. She was, for the first time in years, listening attentively to every word. And hearing it, she began framing the responses she had always avoided framing. Now she wanted to point out how he was formulating opinions as he spoke, taking no time to understand his own point of view, test the limits of his knowledge before opening his mouth. How he was looking at detail, never at the whole. How this did not stop him drawing conclusions which implied the truth-according-to-Duncan was a universal truth.

  She had never said any of this when they were first married, because she had not understood exactly what she thought and could not have articulated it if she had. Later, she had understood and had entered the conversation with a view to challenging Duncan’s assumptions, introducing an alternative angle, or moving the topic on to what she thought would be a more fruitful or interesting area for discussion. It had been frustrating. So she stopped listening. She allowed the rattle of Duncan’s words to roll over and past her.

  Of course, there were times when they had truly talked to each other, on topics that mattered. He was not a foolish man, not unfeeling, unsympathetic, self-centered, vain or touchy. He was someone she had married because she thought he was the husband she wanted. (It had not occurred to her that she might not want a husband at all.) What he did not have was stillness and depth, and the half an hour he had spent on the boat so far had reminded her what living with his noise and triviality had cost her.

  “I do
n’t know where I want to live,” she said. “Except it isn’t 42 Beech Grove.”

  An expression crossed Duncan’s face that she realized was irritation. He was a man capable of being irritated, even easy to irritate, but he had never before shown any irritation toward her. He hadn’t had to, she thought. He had only had to smile and soothe and be a little patronizing and she would back away from any potential argument, not bothering to stand up for herself. Conflict had been almost entirely absent from their marriage. So in this flash of exasperation, she recognized a shift. He, too, had looked beneath the surface of their life together and found her, as she had found him, imperfect. This was an exciting development. All her fears for this meeting, that it would be platitudes coming down like stair rods and she would have to use all her fortitude not to raise the umbrella of indifference against them, vanished.

  “I guessed that,” he said. Then made a series of pouting, sucking movements with his lips. “Can I take it you also don’t want to live with me?”

  “I haven’t changed my mind,” Sally said. “If anything, I’m clearer now that being married to each other is not the best thing for either of us. What do you think?”

  It was as if she had given him the cue to a line he had rehearsed but did not know how to introduce. He looked happier at once.

  “I have to say,” he said, “I have been doing a lot of thinking along those very lines myself. I’ve been thinking about it and then talking it over with Ffion.” Of course you have, Sally thought. Ffion lived next door and was a collector of other people’s stories, which she dramatized and used as social currency to create status for herself in the community. “She’s been very helpful, actually. She’s really helped me sort out what I feel, just by listening to me, mostly, and throwing in the odd word. The truth is—I hope you realize I’m not trying to be hurtful—I never felt you did actually listen to me. You were always a bit slow to pick up on what I was saying and to give it a bit of a bat back and forth, so to speak. I know you’re cleverer than I am, and I admit I sometimes felt as if you weren’t responding because you could see so many more sides to a thing than I could—you know, see the back and the sides while I was standing staring at the front.”