Sally was surprised to find he understood this, but more surprised by another part of this speech.
“What makes you think I’m cleverer than you?” she asked. “You’re the one with qualifications and a job that needs you to apply your brain.”
“Oh, yes, but that’s just knowing facts. I’ve always been good at learning facts and fitting facts into patterns. But when it comes to ideas—what would you call it, concepts?—well, I think you’re well ahead of me.”
“I didn’t know you thought that,” Sally said.
“I did and I do and I’ve often had the feeling you might hold me in contempt but then I’m not the type to brood or dwell on things and I do tend to the positive outlook so I’ve always reminded myself how you’ve never actually argued with me and you seemed to be happy and…”
“I don’t hold you in contempt,” Sally said. “But everything else you’re saying is right. I didn’t bother to argue with you even when I didn’t agree with what you were saying, and I’m not sure that was fair. It was the same as ignoring you, and I suppose that is treating you with contempt. If I agreed to come back and try again, I can’t promise to be any different.”
“That’s the point, you’ve seen our marriage front, back and sides, haven’t you? While I’ve been looking at the, what’s the word, the façade.”
“I don’t think I did so consciously.”
“No, but you see, you have understood it when I didn’t, and you’ve done us both a favor. You’ve helped me look at it in the round, so to speak, and that’s been a good thing. What I’ve seen, since you’ve been gone, talking to Ffion and to Laura in the office, who’s a really good listener, is that the life I was leading wasn’t as good as I thought it was. We spent our free time, now that the children have gone, looking after the house and the garden. Well, I’m here to tell you I don’t want to do that anymore.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“I want to sell the house, split the money and use my share to buy a flat in town. I want to enjoy myself.”
Sally wondered who he would be enjoying himself with—Ffion? Laura? Because she knew Duncan well enough to know that he could not enjoy himself on his own. She hoped he knew that, too, and had already lined up candidates to be on the sofa at the day’s end.
“I understand,” she said.
“But what about you? You don’t seem any clearer now than you were before you left. What will you do? You’ll have half the proceeds from the house, of course, and half our investments.”
Sally asked him how much that might be and he told her. It was more money than she had imagined. The area they had bought in, Duncan explained, had become more and more desirable. The mortgage was a fraction of the value.
“You could buy a barge,” Duncan said, “like this one. There’d be money left over to live on if you didn’t want to go back to your job. Or you could find a job in another part of the country where houses are cheaper and buy a house.”
“Please,” Sally said, “please stop speculating on my behalf. I can work it out for myself.”
Duncan fidgeted. “I suppose if we were to go for a divorce you might be able to claim a share of my income, or my pension. Is that what you’re thinking?”
“No! What you’ve suggested sounds so simple, and as you’ve paid more of the mortgage I think it’s more than fair.”
“There’s your individual savings accounts, too,” said Duncan.
“Stop it at once,” Sally said. “Do we need some agreements drawn up?”
“Yes, I’ve consulted with a solicitor and…”
“Well, I’ll wait for you to tell me where to sign.” Behind Duncan’s head she could see the sun sparkling on the water, see the trace left by a duck coming to investigate the boat. She could hear Noah snoring and feel the roughness of his flank against her foot. She was in free fall; soon she would have to pull the cord to activate the parachute, choosing a spot to steer toward for a painless landing. But for this moment, she could enjoy the sensation of having jumped out of the plane and having nothing holding her back.
She had to give Duncan lunch. She had to endure his first experience of the boat’s lavatory and his views on that experience. That he was as relieved as she was that they had come to so agreeable a view of their jointly separate future was evident in his ebullience, his need to comment on everything.
“All good things must come to a Brussels sprout,” he said, back at the turnoff. “As they say.”
“Indeed they must,” she said, and hugged him. After a moment of surprise, he hugged her back. They did not attempt a kiss.
* * *
ANASTASIA WAS OCCUPYING TOO LITTLE of Eve’s time, during her spell as carer. She suspected Anastasia was keeping out of her way; she recognized she was brisk to the point of bullying, in comparison to Jacob and Vic, who seemed to be around more than she had expected them to be. All this gave her time to think, and she thought she needed a plan. Being back in the flat reminded her of the way she used to operate: an end was in sight and therefore a new beginning had to be formulated, as, in her old life, she had begun to think about the next project before the current project was fully wrapped up. She should by now have some parameters, a vision, a handful of key deliverables jotted down on a sheet of paper. Probably a couple of visuals that represented the point of departure and the distant destination, or that conceptualized the territory the new project would be aiming to occupy with reference to existing fixed points in the company’s business and in the marketplace. Now was the time when decisions would need to be made. But she had insufficient data. She liked to start without considering the detail, but with enough information to pin down the options.
Some days ago, she had received an email from someone she had worked with in the past. He had mentioned a new project and invited her to phone him.
His name was Juri, and he was Finnish. He had worked for Rambusch, but only briefly, because he’d never learned to appreciate the banter, with its cheerful crudeness and edge of aggression. He tried to ignore it, telling Eve, in the early days of his employment, that he hoped hard work and achievements would be effective in securing respect, which he equated with a silencing of the needling laughter. She knew it wouldn’t. On the contrary. She pointed out to him that the level of abuse he was experiencing, masquerading as good humor, was a form of respect. If he had been no challenge, no better than competent, he would have been, if not left alone, at least only intermittently noticed. As it was, there was a frisson of fear running through his peer group’s treatment of him. Not only was he highly competent, and ambitious, but he was both taller and better looking than most of them. Doing the job better than they were, on top of this, would make life unbearable. He couldn’t understand this distorted logic, so she was not surprised when he moved on.
Nor was she particularly disappointed, though he had moved in with her shortly after joining the company because she appreciated those things that upset her male colleagues—his good looks, his height. And of course, his intellect. It had felt like love, for a while, but this was an emotion she had always struggled to sustain. She found it difficult to overlook the negatives. By the time he left, and despite the physique, good looks and remarkably astute brain, she was beginning to dread the evenings and weekends spent in the company of someone for whom nothing, however absurd, was a joke. But they had stayed in touch. They had met from time to time at conferences and exhibitions. He had congratulated her on her rise through the company’s hierarchy. She had congratulated him on his marriage (to someone small, serious and Finnish) and his successive successful projects for increasingly impressive international organizations.
When she had opened the email asking her to ring him, she had been disturbed by the idea. She knew that if she had phoned him, she would have become excited about the project and she wasn’t then ready to be excited. Now she was. So she rang him.
Eve and Anastasia were invited up to Jacob’s flat for dinner. Jacob had cooked th
e whole meal from a book by Nigel Slater, which he said was easy to follow. It was a better starting point for a newly interested cook, he said, than the one he’d sent her, but he had wanted to show her how interesting cooking and cookery writing could be. The food was delicious. It took some while to eat and some more while to talk through the ingredients and the recipe. The wine, chosen by Vic, was too good to leave any in the bottle, and Vic himself turned out to be a witty raconteur after a glassful, so there was never a moment when Eve could let her mind wander back to the conversation she had had with Juri. Then when they went back downstairs, Anastasia seemed to take a long, long time to prepare for bed and Eve, worried about her, sat up listening to make sure she had gone to sleep and that the noises of Anastasia sleeping were only the usual noises and nothing more alarming. It was after midnight when she finally relaxed, and she was too tired to structure her thoughts so she didn’t try.
She drew, on a piece of paper, the alternative circles into which she might choose to put a foot. Each circle had a focus, people and places. The first had the Number One, Sally and Anastasia, Chester and Uxbridge. The second circle had Project Prospero, which stood for an energy infrastructure as yet undelivered but not completely undefined, Juri’s name, and those of a few other people she had met or worked with in the past; it had Uzbekistan and the UK, undefined. The third circle was the least well populated. The focus was a job; more research needed to identify what jobs might be available, where, working with whom. Juri had given her the name of a headhunter, and so the first step was to make another phone call. Only not at one o’clock in the morning.
She looked at her circles and then drew a timeline underneath them, from this evening, here in Uxbridge, for the next six months. She needed to redraw the picture with the circles on the timeline, checking the overlap, marking the decision points, highlighting the steps needed to acquire the detail necessary to make a decision, to eliminate or to keep. Only not tonight.
* * *
ANASTASIA HAD AN APPOINTMENT WITH the specialist. Sally took her to the hospital in Eve’s new car and left her at the entrance while she found a place to park. When she returned, she found Anastasia had not gone on to where the clinic was being held, but had waited for her, perched on a chair by the automatic doors which opened and closed as the flow of the sick and the apparently well never ceased.
“All right?” Sally said.
Anastasia nodded. “I need you to come in with me,” she said. “I didn’t want to get hustled in before you turned up.”
“We’ll do this together,” Sally said, and stood near enough for Anastasia to hold her arm, if she needed to.
When they reached the waiting area for the clinic, Anastasia was taken away to be weighed and have her blood pressure checked.
“Why do they do that?” she said, sitting back down.
“Collecting statistics?” suggested Sally. “It’s vital to have data. Eve says so.”
Anastasia snorted.
The consultant, when he called them in, was indescribably clean and pleasant and authoritative. This was obviously not the first time he had met Anastasia, and he treated her as if he knew and liked her.
“I won’t ask how you are feeling,” he said. “But I expect you to tell me if anything is bothering you.”
“Get on with it,” said Anastasia.
The news he gave them was better than Sally had feared but worse then she had hoped it might be. The operation had, their analysis told them, removed the cancerous cells, but because of the extent of these cells and the location, he wanted to follow up with a course of chemotherapy. Six sessions, one a week for six weeks. This meant—Sally wondered if he was frank with patients less indomitable and forthright, which was likely to be all his other patients—that she would spend a couple of days every week feeling sick. How sick he couldn’t say, as different people responded differently, but she would, at the very least, feel unwell. The treatment was debilitating and it would take her some time to recover. After six months, they would do a scan and if that was clear she would be called back for scans once a year until they were satisfied.
“I see,” said Anastasia. “So you want to rough me up some more before you spit me out and let me go back to leading my life in the way I choose to lead it.”
“Yes,” he said. “I want to hold on to you for a while longer in the hope that I never have to see you again after that.”
“I don’t want to see you again, either, but I can avoid that by dying, without bothering you further in the matter.”
“Don’t do that,” said the consultant. “You’ll mess up my statistics.”
They hardly spoke on the way back to the flat. Anastasia, as she had done on previous days, went and lay down for a couple of hours. Sally listened for evidence she had gone to sleep, the whistly snores she associated with Anastasia sleeping, but heard nothing. Still, after the two hours were up, Anastasia got up and came through to sit on the sofa and drink a cup of tea.
“The medical profession don’t think the fridge is damaged beyond repair,” Sally said.
“No,” said Anastasia. “That much is clear. I just have to decide whether I want to go through the process of having it repaired.”
“I understand.”
“I’m glad it was you with me today,” Anastasia said.
“Eve would have understood, too.”
“I know. But she would have wanted to talk about making a decision, and I’m not ready to do that.”
Before she left, to be replaced by Trompette, Sally said:
“You may not be able to work the locks on your own anymore but that doesn’t stop you living on a canal.”
“I’ll take into account that you said that.”
“And there is no point rejecting the treatment without first finding out how bad it is.”
“I’m afraid you’re probably right about that.”
* * *
TROMPETTE: Sally?
SALLY: Is everything all right?
TROMPETTE: You’ll never guess what’s happened.
SALLY: Well, you’d better tell me, then.
TROMPETTE: Arthur’s turned up.
SALLY: Oh? Is that good news or bad news?
TROMPETTE: It’s good. I was really worried about her after the first chemo session. She wasn’t particularly sick or anything but she was so miserable. It felt as if she was thinking of giving up. I mean, Anastasia, giving up! I was really frightened.
SALLY: And she isn’t now? Looking as if she’s about to give up?
TROMPETTE: No. Arthur sort of bats everything she says back at her. I’d been out shopping so I wasn’t there when he came, and they seemed to be in the middle of an almighty row when I got back. Only Arthur was being the strong, sensible one and Anastasia was doing the shouting. Except she can’t actually shout—she hasn’t got enough puff—so she was sort of whispering fiercely.
SALLY: Goodness!
TROMPETTE: Yes. Anastasia told me to run along and bother Jacob and leave them in peace, so I did. When I went downstairs again, Arthur was singing to her and she looked positively peaceful.
SALLY: How long is he staying for?
TROMPETTE: Well, that’s the point. He says he can stay for a couple of weeks, so I said I’d go back to the boat and they told me not to. I’m not sure they want to be alone together. War might break out, or something. So I said one of you two would be coming as soon as I left anyway, and they didn’t seem to think that was a good idea, either. They want me to stay until you both get here with the Number One.
SALLY: Yes, I can see you’d be easier to have around than either of us.
TROMPETTE: You mean, I don’t really matter.
SALLY: That’s not what I’m saying at all, my dear. But you’re more restful, less likely to provoke an argument by expressing your own opinions. So do you mind holding on? Have you got plenty of wool?
TROMPETTE: Lots. I can stay here and knit. I don’t mind. And if they start fighting I’ll go upstairs
and get Jacob to make me some chocolate brownies.
SALLY: Trompette, you’re a treasure. Let me know if things take a turn for the worse.
TROMPETTE: I will.
* * *
THEY WERE BACK ON THE canal they had traveled along going in the opposite direction all those weeks ago. Sally on Grimm, Eve on the Number One. Too far apart, as they pressed on, mile after mile, to share their idle thoughts as they had done the last time they passed this way.
They went through Blisworth Tunnel, the Number One in the lead as it had the better, brighter light. Eve remembered how anxious she had been, on the previous trip, and how Arthur had played a tune on his harmonica. Arthur. Alone on the Number One the previous night she had taken out her plan with its overlapping circles and crossed some things out, adjusted the timeline, begun to map a few actions along the way. Forget Arthur. He might fit, he might not. But first, she had to talk to Sally.
* * *
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, when they were sitting waiting for the shepherd’s pie that Sally had made to cook.
“Not much else to do,” said Sally. “Tell me what you’ve been thinking.”
“That I will take the Project Prospero job.”
“I thought you would.”
“But also, I will buy a house. Now what have you been thinking?”
“I’ve been thinking I might buy a house or I might buy a narrowboat.”
“Where would you buy a house?”
“By a canal, obviously. With a mooring, if I can afford it.”
The Narrowboat Summer Page 27