by Georgie Hall
Mum calls as I drive – I have to bark ‘answer call!’ to make it respond – and we manage a quick exchange of hellos and my plea of ‘of course I haven’t been avoiding speaking to you, Mum,’ before another call comes through, the phone screen telling me it’s Ed’s school. ‘I have to take this, but don’t hang up, Mum, I can put you on hold. Hold call one! Answer call two!’
‘Hello? Eliza?’ Mum is still there.
‘Hold call one! Answer call two!’ I command more bullishly.
‘Mrs Hollander? I’m so sorry to bother you, but we can’t get through to Mr Hollander.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Year Seven are on the coach, but Edward’s been violently—’
‘Hello? Eliza?’ It’s Mum again.
‘Sorry, Mum, hang on a bit longer. Hold call one! Answer call two!’
‘Hello? Eliza?’
‘Mrs Hollander?’
‘It’s gone to conference call, sorry!’
‘ – all over the upholstery, I’m afraid, Mrs Hollander. He can’t possibly continue on to PGL. We have a strict rule that all children who vomit must be isolated for twenty-four hours.’
‘But it’s only travel sickness, surely?’
‘My daughter’s right!’ Mum leaps to my defence. ‘Did you remember to give him a Kwell, Eliza?’
Bugger.
‘You can’t get hold of his father you say? Because I’m on my way to – Leicester.’ Oh, the scalding shame of the lie. ‘Where is the coach now?’
‘On the A46 near Snitterfield. In a layby. How soon can you get there?’
I am minutes away from it. I want to scream. I have to go there. My great runaway is already limping home.
‘That’s near me!’ Mum says brightly. ‘I can pick Edward up in five minutes. We’ll spend the day together, then I can drop him home with Paddy later.’
‘Are you sure?’
Her voice drops to a reassuring growl. ‘I am dying to get away from your father and Miles. That’s why I’ve been calling you: I’m furious they want to sell the boat. I’ve only just offered her to the BBC as a Shakespeare and Hathaway location.’
‘Oh, I love that series!’ cries the school secretary. Moments later they’re comparing favourite episodes over my dodgy Aldi Bluetooth.
I cut them off, sending up a silent prayer for Ed to be OK.
My mission is back on.
*
I’ve parked the rust bucket in Long Stay, rather than near the marina. As I cross Bridge Road, I keep a nervous eye out for Paddy, who I wouldn’t rule out driving straight here after dropping Edward. Also for Miles. And the police. Is this a criminal act? It must be. What I’m about to commit is, I suspect, technically theft. I’m feeling distinctly paranoid.
Luck’s on my side. The council tree surgeons are out in force in the little garden that runs alongside the marina, chainsaws firing up to lop branches. It’s incredibly noisy, the air full of dust and leaves, tourists staying away from this side of the historic bridge, nobody sitting outside the café.
I’ve brought dark glasses and a baseball cap which I cram on as I make my way stealthily into the marina.
The narrowboats to either side of The Tempest are locked up and unmanned, none of Paddy’s bargees in sight to raise an alarm when his missus makes a quick getaway on a collision course with their precious hulls.
No time to lose. I unlock the boatman’s cabin and dump my Apprentice suitcase, hurry to the well deck to turn on the water and gas. Emma Thompson’s chocolates are still in the galley, making my throat tighten as I think how foolishly I behaved yesterday.
Back at the stern, I pull up the engine cover hatch. Check oil, coolant filters, fuel and water. Switch the batteries across to charge, check the pump’s switched to on, close the hatch. There’s a full tank of fuel as well as plenty of gas and water to see us through a few days if necessary.
I’m shocked by how much adrenaline is thrumming through me. Also by how unnervingly good it feels. In a slightly nauseating way.
The control panel is beside me. Key in ignition. Turn to HEAT and wait a few beeps. Turn to START and hear her roar. Let key return to RUN.
So far so good.
Cast off mooring ropes. Bow first, then stern then centre. Trickier alone – Paddy’s bloody knots! – but not impossible. No gusting wind to push us about today, thank goodness.
Throttle in gear. Tiller in hand. AirPods in, Annie on – ‘I Need a Man’.
I don’t think so.
We’re off.
I’m running away on The Tempest. I’m going to hide her until my wedding anniversary. My brother will lose this bet. As long as he doesn’t catch me first.
18
Time Travelling
Stratford upon Avon, mecca for Shakespeare lovers and swans, is also important for its waterways, marking the point where the Midlands canal system meets the River Avon.
It’s the Stratford Canal that’s closest to Paddy’s heart, its fifty-four narrow locks, four iron aqueducts and a single long tunnel being clever feats of industrial engineering enabling twenty-five miles of manmade transport vein to wend its watery way north through the Warwickshire countryside to King’s Norton in Birmingham. It’s part of a big circular cruising route known as the Avon Ring, along with the Birmingham Navigations, the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, then two rivers which return boaters to Stratford, the Severn and Shakespeare’s Avon.
I prefer the rivers to the canals; the Avon’s been navigated for centuries, but never tamed. It floods fiercely at times, its George Eliot mills isolated like ships in great water meadow expanses. Fringed with rushes and overhung with willow, it’s a beautiful, savage thread of nature that knows its own bloody-minded path, not caring if it steals through great landowners’ estates, farms, villages or forests. In watery terms, it’s Heathcliff.
*
Annie stops singing as I pull away from the marina. It’s Mum calling my phone, a disembodied Siri voice tells me.
My AirPods – a birthday gift from Jules – are far smarter tech than the rust bucket’s Aldi Bluetooth, but I’m no smarter at using them, and I press the right once too often, only hearing ‘… we’ve just got an ice cream and he feels much better! We’re about to…’ before I cut her off again.
At least Ed is OK.
I cannot let my focus sway. I take my AirPods out and put them in my back pocket.
*
Here’s my plan: I’m taking the River Avon because nobody will expect me to. It’s harder to navigate, teeming with pleasure cruisers, restaurant boats, sightseeing day trippers and canoeists, more anonymous than the narrow canal with its well-trodden towpaths, multiple road bridges and army of gongoozlers. (Not to mention aqueducts.) It’s also got far fewer locks to negotiate. The few that are on it are admittedly fierce, but there’s bound to be people around to help in hot June weather like this. The secret is to look as though I know what I’m doing whilst not drawing attention to myself. As Mum would say, ‘Act like you can do it, darling girl!’ I thought it all through in the early hours: I’ll wear a sunhat and dark glasses and adopt a Brummy bargee accent, and I’ve already draped a couple of picnic blankets over the old girl’s cabin sides to obscure her name.
I plan to message Paddy later to let him know what I’m doing, but not until I’m too far away to catch. I have no doubt he’ll try to find me – as will Miles as soon as he gets wind I’m taking him up on his dare – but they’ll think I’m on the canal. And even if (when) they work out I’m on the river, both will bank on me staying close to the town. Which is why I’ve rejected my first plan to hide The Tempest in one of the overgrown, tree-fringed inlets a few miles downstream, a familiar stretch of river we’ve nicknamed Heart of Darkness because it’s so wild. Paddy will know that’s exactly where I want to hide out. What he’ll never expect me to do is go a bridge too far.
Downstream from Stratford, there are just two road bridges that cross Shakespeare’s Avon in almost seven river-cruis
ing hours, both historic and narrow-arched, Binton Bridge and Bidford Bridge, known collectively to the family as the BBs or Bastard Bridges. Both are notoriously tricky if the river’s fast and not much easier if not. I have never steered The Tempest through either of them, these two stone river-monsters that Hollander family lore places on a danger par with anacondas and dysentery.
Today, I plan to go beyond both BBs. The thought makes me clutch my pearls and pray.
My finishing target is Harvington Lock, which sits in an isolated spot close to a riverside garden where we were guests at a rip-roaringly riparian fortieth birthday donkeys years ago. Our hosts – a gregarious couple we’d met through our children’s school PTA – rowed a bunch of guests out to show us a derelict old mill on an overgrown river island with its own dry dock, the perfect hideaway for a narrowboat. According to Google it’s still there, only more derelict.
I messaged the couple first thing this morning with Mrs Peel cunning: Are you still living in that gorgeous spot by the mill? Know someone who might be mooring nearby this week and loves spooky ruins if it’s still there? Eliza (Summer’s mum) x To which they immediately replied: Hello lovely Eliza Summersmum! Long time no see! Mill just as was! Tell friend to pop in for a snifter! Will give tour! Here all week! Xxx and I felt a rush of gratitude that there are still people in the world unembarrassed of exclamation marks and words like snifter, which helps add to the sixties Avengers’ vibe.
To get there, as well as navigating the dreaded BBs, The Tempest and I must make our way through six river locks.
First, let’s exit Stratford inconspicuously. Just getting out of the marina has drawn a bit of an audience on the bridge, but I’ve done this bit enough times to manage it reasonably smoothly. I try to fantasise I’m Lomax, unflappably cool, not for a moment betraying to the onlooking crowd that I am stealing this boat.
‘Drive on the right!’ I mutter under my breath to The Tempest like we’re exiting the cross-Channel ferry as we chug into open water. Except in Calais there isn’t ever an All A-Bard Open Top Tour Boat unexpectedly in my path, bunting fluttering, half its passengers videoing me. And my steering’s better.
‘Sorry!’ I miss it by inches.
My heart is thumping so hard I can barely hear my own voice.
Crossing in front of the lock that leads up to the Stratford Canal, the river is a-bob with hired rowboats and pleasure craft. Swans are pimping for food from the gallery, the metal footbridge over the entrance to the lock weighed down with tourists. I’m again photographed and videoed as we glide past. Somebody shouts out ‘Hey, lady!’ I also think I hear ‘Mum!’ but I’m putting that down to guilt.
I rev away, baseball cap rammed down low, avoiding swans and fellow boaters downstream.
Theatre straight ahead. Must put on a good performance, audacious as a player on a regal Elizabethan row-barge.
*
Up ahead is my first lock, the daunting Trinity. Braced with industrial iron girders like the ribs of a giant dinosaur to hold it square between silty banks, its descent is a hulking, black-hulled open grave of engineering. How do I do this alone? My heart’s banging in time to the engine rattle but I’m determined to nail this challenge.
Then I spot a sight more welcome than a free checkout in Lidl on a Saturday: an open lock.
Unlike canal locks, which we must close after us when we leave like field gates, on rivers we’re asked to leave them casually open when we go out – the Avon’s water will never drain out through cavalier caretaking, after all – and the joy with which I greet a little white riverboat emerging from the lock is up there with spotting a parking space in central London. I cruise straight in, the water high in readiness. Just need to nudge up to the lock side, hop off, tie her up and get cracking.
*
All canal and river locks are essentially the same, big or small. Water is higher one side than the other. The section between is sealed off by ‘gates’. After entering, we need to close the gates behind us and either fill it or drain it down to the level of the waterway in front before opening the doors ahead to continue. To do this, we need to lift ‘paddles’ in the gates to let water in or out, like running and letting out a bath. Each gate has a mechanism ratcheted up by ingenious winches and pulleys that we operate with a key called a ‘windlass’ – as in a windblown girl, not a clock-winding one. All canal boats carry at least one windlass, and tackling a lock’s not a bad workout.
If you can get off your boat to do it.
Crack, crack, crack. The bow hits the stone lock wall repeatedly. It takes me forever to get the right angle. Locks intimidate me: green-slimed, brick-lined pits into which I must descend to go downriver.
When I finally leap off – wringing sweat, the ropes tangled, my knots fumbled – my gratitude that nobody was watching my bad captaining switches to anxiety that there’s nobody here to help. Just geese. Tens of Canada geese honking up. They’re as territorial and aggressive as football fans spotting a rival shirt in their stand.
I’m a woman under siege by wildfowl as I heave the gates shut and use the metal windlass to clatter the paddles down.
Sweatier still. Breathing hard. Legs pecked.
Why am I bloody doing this again? I move to the front gate paddles now and raise one. The Tempest bucks, pushed forwards hard by the force of river releasing, ropes straining. I cross to the other side to crank open the second lock paddle. Gush, swoosh, woosh.
Listening to the water, I suddenly need a wee so badly I’m tempted to hurry behind a bush, but the geese are back on the attack, honking furiously. And the boat’s doing something weird.
Shit, shit, shit! She’s tilting.
I’ve tied the ropes too tight to the moorings, trussing her up high as the level drops away. Blood pressure rocketing, I leap to the rescue, knowing she could capsize this way.
She rocks hard when I release them, the decks soaked. Now she’s going down, coffin lowered into grave until, at last, the level from lock to river downstream matches.
Tie her off again, open the lower gate, cross over the footbridge to the other, open that, pausing to catch my breath. Behind me, the geese honk furiously as a runner goes past, panting and pounding. I don’t turn, watching transfixed as two swans take off downriver, running and flapping clumsily on water before air’s elegance lifts them up and away. Swans mate for life, I remember. Like barn owls, sea horses, wolves and Hollander men.
Hearing a thump from the boat, now deep in the lock, I peer over in a panic but she’s still in one piece down there, so I cross back again, untie her, then brace myself to climb down the ladder inset in the lock wall to get back on deck. It’s wet, slimy and rusted.
Why am I doing this? I want to go home.
I close my eyes going down, frightened I’ll fall. I’m awash with sweat. Paddy would have the narrowboat’s stern perfectly aligned to step on easily. By contrast, I splat onto the roof, turning my ankle and swearing a lot before scrambling back to the tiller, cranking the throttle forward and exiting into dappled sunlight.
Cue instant happiness. Fast as drugs in a vein. Is this a menopausal mood swing, or simply joy? I love coming out of locks, claustrophobia traded for the wardrobe doors to Narnia. How beautiful is this? Crinkled silk river ahead, park to our left, weir right. The geese are gone and I have swan outriders now. I feel like Leda. Except, now I think about it, I’m pretty sure Zeus disguised himself as a swan to rape her. Odette maybe? Nope, she died when Siegfried danced with the wrong bird. Bloody men.
You can do this alone! I remind myself. You don’t need Paddy pedantically at your ear, telling you how to do it all.
The weir roars to my right. I can feel its force tug us as the barge powers slowly away from the lock, the willows giving way to a view up to the converted mill with its luxury retirement flats where I was conducting viewings just twenty-four hours ago. I have the strangest sensation of living a parallel life, looking back in at myself.
There’s somebody on the balcony of that
same third-floor flat. I recognise the blonde bombshell hair of one of the senior negotiators. She must be hosting another viewing. She’s leaning on the balcony rail, looking straight at The Tempest. Surely she won’t recognise me?
Oh God, she’s waving and calling.
Keep calm! The Tempest is simply drawing the eye again, I reassure myself. Sure enough, another figure has joined her to admire the old narrowboat. Raising a bargee hand and lowering my head, we chug on. Slowly.
Ahead lies the Seven Meadows Bridge, the second of Stratford’s road crossings which carries traffic over the river on the town’s western edge, open countryside beyond.
More shouts from the mill. Was that my name? I glance reluctantly up again. The second figure on the balcony is waving too, a man in possession of sharp tailoring and an intense gaze I recognise even from this distance. Matteo Mele.
He cups his hands to his mouth. ‘Bellissima!’
Refusing to react, I lower my hat peak and look away. Let him think he’s got the wrong woman. Here on the river, I am not Eliza Finch the fifty-year-old actor who pants out bad prose, nor Eliza Hollander, over-huggy mother and neglectful sex-phobic wife who thought she was long past succumbing to a stranger’s persuasive panache and prosecco. Forget conflicted daughter and competitive sister, grieving dog lover and menopausal motorist; I’m acting against all my types.
I’m being unpredictable and I love it. I haven’t felt like this in twenty years. Today I could be anybody, achieve anything, my future full of possibilities. I could be the next Emma Thompson.
The modern bridges are up ahead, foot then road, the first cool stripe of shadow soothing my brow as we pass under, then a longer one marking the start of the adventure proper.
My phone is buzzing like mad with messages, and ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ plays out twice, but I ignore it.
This is more than boat theft – I’m taking my life back.
19
Maritime