Stripey did not care to be fed by human beings, and understood how to keep herself warm in cold weather. She slept outside, on one or other of the stove pipes which projected out of the stacks on deck. Curled up on the pipe, she acted as an obstruction which drove the smoke down again into the barge, making it almost uninhabitable. In turn, Woodie, Willis, Nenna, Maurice and even his visitors could be heard coughing uncontrollably. But Stripey rarely chose to sleep in the same place two nights running.
From the masthead Tilda, having sailed out to sea with Grace, took a closer survey of the Reach. Her whole idea of the world’s work was derived from what she observed there and had little in common with the circulation of the great city which toiled on only a hundred yards away.
No movement on Lord Jim. Willis was walking towards Dreadnought with the man from the boatyard, whose manner suggested that he was refusing to supply more tar, gas and water until the previous bill had been paid.
On Rochester, Woodie was getting ready to lay up for the winter. It seemed that he was not, after all, a true bargedweller. His small recording company, as he explained only too often, had gone into voluntary liquidation, leaving him with just enough to manage nicely, and he was going to spend the cold weather in his house in Purley. Managing nicely seemed an odd thing to do at the north end of the Reach. Woodie also spoke of getting someone to anti-foul his hull, so that it would be as clean as Lord Jim’s. The other barges were so deeply encrusted with marine life that it was difficult to strike wood. Green weeds and barnacles were thick on them, and whales might have saluted them in passing.
Maurice was deserted, Maurice having been invited, as he quite often was, to go down for the day to Brighton. But his deckhouse did not appear to be locked. A light van drew up on the wharf, and a man got out and dropped a large quantity of cardboard boxes over the side of the wharf onto the deck. One of them broke open. It was full of hair-dryers. The man then had to drop down on deck and arrange the boxes more carefully. It would have been better to cover them with a tarpaulin, but he had forgotten to bring one, perhaps. He wasted no time in looking round and it was only when he was backing the van to drive away that his face could be seen. It was very pale and had no expression, as though expressions were surplus to requirements.
Willis, walking in his deliberate way, looked at the boxes on Maurice, paused, even shook his head a little, but did nothing. Nenna might have added to her list of things that men do better than women their ability to do nothing at all in an unhurried manner. And in fact there was nothing that Willis could do about the boxes. Quite certainly, Maurice did not want the police on his boat.
‘Ahoy there, Tilda! Watch yourself!’ Willis called.
Tilda knew very well that the river could be dangerous. Although she had become a native of the boats, and pitied the tideless and ratless life of the Chelsea inhabitants, she respected the water and knew that one could die within sight of the Embankment.
One spring evening a Dutch barge, the Waalhaven, from Rotterdam, glittering with brass, impressive, even under power, had anchored in midstream opposite the boats. She must have got clearance at Gravesend and sailed up on the ebb. Of this fine vessel the Maurice, also from Rotterdam, had once been a poor relation. The grounded barges seemed to watch the Waalhaven, as prisoners watch the free.
Her crew lined up on deck as gravely as if at a business meeting. A spotless meeting of well-regarded business men in rubber seaboots, conducted in the harmonious spirit which had always characterised the firm.
Just after teatime the owner came to the rails and called out to Maurice to send a dinghy so that he could put a party ashore. When nothing happened, and he realised that he had come to a place without facilities, he retired for another consultation. Then, as the light began to fail, with the tide running very fast, three of them launched their own dinghy and prepared to sail to the wharf. They had been waiting for high water so that they could sail alongside in a civilised manner. It was like a demonstration in small boat sailing, a lesson in holiday sport. They still wore their seaboots, but brought their shoregoing shoes with them in an oilskin bag. The gods of the river had, perhaps, taken away their wits.
The offshore wind was coming hard as usual through the wide gap between the warehouses on the Surrey side. Woodie, observing their gallant start, longed to lend them his Chart 3 and to impress upon them that there was one competent owner at least at this end of the Reach. Richard, back from work after a tiresome day, stopped on the Embankment to look, and remembered that he had once gone on board the Waalhaven for a drink when she put in at Orfordness.
Past the gap, the wind failed and dropped to nothing, the dinghy lost way and drifted towards three lighters moored abreast. Her mast caught with a crack which could be heard on both sides of the river on the high overhang of the foremost lighter. The whole dinghy was jammed and sucked in under the stem, then rolled over, held fast by her steel mast which would not snap. The men were pitched overboard and they too were swallowed up beneath the heavy iron bottoms of the lighters. After a while the bag of shoes came up, then two of the men, then a pair of seaboots, floating soles upwards.
Tilda thought of this incident with distress, but not often. She wondered what had happened to the other pairs of boots. But her heart did not rule her memory, as was the case with Martha and Nenna. She was spared that inconvenience.
Willis called again, ‘Ahoy there, Tilda! Don’t shout down back to me!’ Imagining her to be delicate, he was anxious for her not to strain her voice. Tilda and Martha both sang absolutely true, and Willis, who was fond of music, and always optimistic about the future of others, liked to think of them as concert performers. They could still manage Abends, wenn wir schlafen gehen, taught them by the nuns as a party piece, and then, indeed, they sounded like angels, though angels without much grasp of the words after the second line. More successful, perhaps, was Jailhouse Rock. But Tilda had taught herself to produce, by widening her mouth into the shape of an oblong, a most unpleasant imitation of a bosun’s whistle, which could be heard almost as far as Lord Jim. The sound indicated that she was coming down the mast. Father Watson had been more than a little frightened by it, and had confided in the nuns that it was more like something produced by some mechanical contrivance, than by a human being. His words confirmed the opinion of the Sisters of Misericord that the two children, so clever and musical, were at risk on the boat, spiritually and perhaps physically, and that someone ought to speak much more seriously to Mrs James.
3
BELOW decks, Grace was shipshape, but after calling on Lord Jim Nenna always felt impelled to start cleaning the brightwork. They hadn’t much – just the handholds of the companion, the locker hinges, and the pump-handle of the heads, which was part of the original equipment and was engraved with the date: 1905.
Nenna was thirty-two, an age by which if a blonde woman’s hair hasn’t turned dark, it never will. She had come to London after the war as a music student, and felt by this time she was neither Canadian nor English. Edward and she had got married in 1949. She was still at the RSM then, violin first study, and she fell in love as only a violinist can. She didn’t know if they had given themselves sufficient time to think things over before they married – that was the kind of question her sister Louise asked. Edward stayed in the Engineers for a bit, then came out and was not very successful in finding a job to suit him. That wasn’t his fault, and if anyone said that it was, Nenna would still feel like poking a hole in them. They got a flat. People who asked her why she didn’t make use of her talent and give singing lessons had perhaps not tried to do this while living in two rooms over a greengrocer’s, and looking after young children. But Edward was said by his friends to have business sense, and to be able to make things work. That was why the launderette was so evidently a good investment. It was quite a new idea over here, you didn’t do your washing at home but brought it out to these machines, and the courteous manager greeted you and put in the soap powder for you, and had the c
lothes all ready for you when you came back, but wasn’t alas, as it turned out, much of a hand at doing the accounts. The closing of the launderette had given rise to a case in the County Court, in which Edward and she had been held not to blame, but had been conscious of the contempt of their solicitor, who always seemed to be in a great hurry.
This, no doubt, was the reason that Nenna’s thoughts, whenever she was alone, took the form of a kind of perpetual magistrates’ hearing, in which her own version of her marriage was shown as ridiculously simple and demonstrably right, and then, almost exactly at the same time, as incontrovertibly wrong. Her conscience, too, held, quite uninvited, a separate watching brief, and intervened in the proceedings to read statements of an unwelcome nature.
‘… Your life story so far, Mrs James, has had a certain lack of distinction. I dare say it seemed distinguished enough while you were living it – distinguished, at least, from other peoples’ lives.’
‘You put that very well, my lord.’ She realised that the magistrate had become a judge.
‘Now then … in 1959 your husband came to the conclusion, and I am given to understand that you fully agreed, that it would be a sensible step for him to take employment for fifteen months with a construction firm in Central America, in order to save the larger part of his salary …’
Nenna protested that she had never exactly thought it sensible, it was the parting of lovers, which must always be senseless, but they’d both of them thought that David, Panama, would be a wretched place to take small children to. The words sounded convincing, the judge leaned forward in approbation. Encouraged, she admitted that she had been entrusted with their last £2000, and had bought a houseboat, in point of fact, the barge Grace.
‘The children missed their father?’
‘The older one did. Tilda didn’t seem to, but no-one understands what she thinks except Martha.’
‘Thank you, Mrs James, we should like you to confine yourself to first-hand evidencex … you wrote to your husband, of course, to explain the arrangements you had made in his absence?’
‘I gave him our new address at once. Of course I did.’
‘The address you gave him was 626 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea SW10?’
‘Yes, that’s right. That’s the address of the boatyard office, where they take in the letters.’
‘… giving him the impression, as indeed it would to anyone who did not know the district, that you had secured a well-appointed house or flat in Chelsea, at a very reasonable figure?’
‘Well-appointed’ was quite unfair, but Nenna’s defence, always slow to move, failed to contest it.
‘I didn’t want to worry him. And then, plenty of people would give a lot to live on the Reach.’
‘You are shifting your ground, Mrs James …’
‘When I sent photographs to my sister in Canada, she thought it looked beautiful.’
‘The river is thought of as romantic?’
‘Yes, that’s so!’
‘More so by those who do not know it well?’
‘I can’t answer that.’
‘They may be familiar with the paintings of Whistler, or perhaps with Whistler’s statement that when evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us – then the wayfarer hastens home, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master – her son, in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her?’… shall I read you that deposition again, Mrs James?’
Nenna was silent.
‘Whistler, however, lived in a reasonably comfortable house?’
Nenna refused to give way. ‘You soon get used to the little difficulties. Most people like it very much.’
‘Mrs James. Did your husband, on his return to this country, where he expected to be reunited with his wife and family, like the houseboat Grace very much?’
‘A number of these houseboats, or disused barges, including Grace, are exceedingly damp?’
‘Mrs James. Do you like your husband?’
‘Mrs James. Did your husband, or did he not, complain that the houseboat Grace, apart from being damp, needed extensive repairs, and that it was difficult if not impossible for you to resume any meaningful sexual relationship when your cabin acted as a kind of passageway with your daughters constantly going to and fro to gain access to the hatch, and a succession of persons, including the milkman, trampling overhead? You will tell me that the milkman has refused to continue deliveries, but this only adds weight to my earlier submission that the boat is not only unfit to live in but actually unsafe.’
‘I love him, I want him. While he was away was the longest fifteen months and eight days I ever spent. I can’t believe even now that it’s over. Why don’t I go to him? Well, why doesn’t he come to us? He hasn’t found anywhere at all that we could all of us live together. He’s in some kind of rooms in the north-east of London somewhere.’
‘42b Milvain Street, Stoke Newington.’
‘In Christ’s name, who’s ever heard of such a place?’
‘Have you made any effort to go and see the plaintiff there, Mrs James? I must remind you that we cannot admit any second-hand evidence.’
So now it was out. She was the defendant, or rather the accused, and should have known it all along.
‘I repeat. Have you ever been to Milvain Street, which, for all any of us know, may be a perfectly suitable home for yourself and the issue of the marriage?’
‘I know it isn’t. How can it be?’
‘Is he living there by himself?’
‘I’m pretty sure so.’
‘Not with another woman?’
‘He’s never mentioned one.’
‘In his letters?’
‘He’s never liked writing letters very much.’
‘But you write to him every day. That is perhaps too often?’
‘It seems I can’t do right. Everyone knows that women write a lot of letters.’
To the disapproval and distaste of the court she was shouting.
‘I only want him to give way a little. I only want him to say that I’ve done well in finding somewhere for us to be!’
‘You are very dependent on praise, Mrs James.’
‘That depends, my lord, on who it’s from.’
‘You could be described as an obstinate bitch?’ That was an intervention from her conscience but she had never been known for obstinacy in the past, and it was puzzling to account, really, for her awkward persistence about Grace. In calmer moments, too, she understood how it was that Edward, though generous at heart, found it difficult to give way. He was not much used to giving at all. His family, it seemed, had not been in the habit of exchanging presents, almost inconceivably to Nenna, whose childhood had been gift-ridden, with much atonement, love and reconciliation conveyed in the bright wrappings. Edward had no idea of how to express himself in that way. Nor was he fortunate as a shopper. He had realised, for instance, when Martha was born, that he would do well to take flowers to the hospital, but not that if you buy an azalea in winter and carry it on a bus and through a number of cold streets, all the buds will drop off before you arrive.
Nenna had never criticised the bloomless azalea. It was the other young mothers in the beds each side of her who had laughed at it. That had been 1951. Two of the new babies in the ward had been christened Festival.
‘Your attention, Mrs James.’
The first exhibit in her case was a painful quarrel, laid out before the court in its naked entirety. Edward had not come back from the construction firm at David with anything saved up, but then, she had hardly expected him to. If he had saved anything he would have changed character and would hardly have been the man she loved. And, after all, they had Grace. Nenna, who was of hopeful temperament, intended to ask Edward’s m
other to look after Martha and Tilda for a while. She and Edward would be alone on Grace, and they could batten down and stay in bed for twenty-four hours if they felt like it.
‘Mrs James, are you asking the court to believe that you were sincere in this? You know perfectly well that your husband’s mother lives at a considerable distance, in point of fact in a suburb of Sheffield, and that she has never at any time offered to look after your children.’
Edward had made the same objection. And yet this particular quarrel, now that it was under rigorous scrutiny, hadn’t arisen over that matter at all, but over something else entirely, the question of where Nenna could possibly have put his squash racquets while he was away. They had both of them thought that the climate of Panama would be bad for the racquets, although it turned out in the end that he could perfectly well have taken them with him. If Nenna had brought them with her to Grace, they must certainly have been ruined by the damp. But, worse still, they were not on Grace. Nenna was full of contrition. O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee. Thirty minutes of squash gives a man as much exercise as two hours of any other game. She had been entrusted with the racquets. They were, in a sense, a sacred trust. But she could not remember anything at all about them.
‘You mislaid them deliberately?’
‘I don’t do anything deliberately.’
That seemed to be true. Some of her actions were defensive, others optimistic, more than half of them mistaken.
‘On this occasion you lost your temper, and threw a solid object at Mr James?’
It had only been her bank book, and Edward had been quite right to say that it was not worth reading.
But then the exhibit, the quarrel, hateful and confusing in being exposed to other eyes, changed character and became after all, evidence for the defence. In mid-fury Edward had asked what day of the week she imagined it was, for at the time, in the highly coloured world of the argument, this detail had become of supreme importance.
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