by Georgie Hall
‘Too headstrong and giddy for your own good, my girl! You look like you need cake.’
Oh God, they’re so safe and staunch, so entrenched in life’s tail-end kindness. I love them. I want to throw myself from the boat into comforting arms.
Summer bursts back on deck, kisses me, calls me a fucking legend, apologises for swearing, then leaps deftly across onto the mooring before hurtling up the bank. ‘Hi, Granny and Grandpa! I’ll be back. Can I invite my friend to have tea with us?’
‘Of course!’ Mum watches her running through Big Meadow towards the bridge. ‘Why’s she in such a hurry?’
‘Love’s light wings,’ I sigh and Mum gives me a wise look. By contrast I feel like I have love’s concrete overcoat on.
‘Eliza…’ Dad holds out a hand to help me off the boat to tie her up. ‘All this nonsense is going to end here, yes? If you need money, we can lend you money.’
‘No!’ I stay stubbornly on board. ‘It’s nothing to do with that.’
‘Stop it, Peter!’ Mum snaps. ‘We discussed this.’
‘She’s plainly exhausted and can’t handle that thing.’
‘She handles it a damned sight better than you ever did,’ she snaps then smiles up at me. ‘Don’t give the children a second thought; we’ll look after them both.’ She lifts one of the plastic cool boxes with effort and hands it up to me. ‘Now, I brought you some essential supplies, darling girl: just a few mini quiches and a bottle of chilled white Burgundy.’
‘Thank you so much, Mum.’ I feel even more choked, because she is so rarely my champion – especially when Miles is involved – yet today she is, complete with al fresco dining.
‘Is Edward still locked in the loo?’ she whispers worriedly.
‘There’s a crowbar here somewhere that I’m going to force the door open with.’ I look round the boat’s stern, then start with surprise to see a pair of familiar blue trainers with no-tie toggle laces, above two skinny legs in a school tracksuit.
‘SHUT UP and LISTEN, people!’
Ed is on deck, outward-bound backpack strapped on like a turtle shell, bladeless multitool in hand. ‘I have now completed my game including bonus levels, sealed off the tap in the bathroom and taken apart Ashwell’s Patent Toilet Lock. I’m hungry and I find barging quite boring so I propose that I disembark here to have some of Granny’s sandwiches.’ He pats my arm awkwardly. ‘Also, Mum needs a vacant bathroom because she has to urinate a lot.’
I’m still gaping at him. ‘You broke out? Just like that?’
‘I could always get out of there, Mum,’ he explains in the fast, flat voice he uses when he’s quashing extreme anxiety. ‘It was a matter of being ready to do it. I needed to know that you would be OK. And I now think you are. Mamma Mia!’ He presses the multitool into my hand before jumping onto dry land. ‘You might have the thing that makes you barren and mad, but you are surprisingly good at navigating river locks.’
‘Now get going!’ Mum urges me, glancing over her shoulder and whispering, ‘I think your father might have alerted Miles. While I was laying the picnic table, I caught him with his reading glasses on, holding his phone under his blazer and looking furtive.’ Then she steps back and shouts, ‘Show us all what you’re made of, darling girl!’
An engine snarl makes me glance over my shoulder and I spot a red Ferrari crossing the bridge, drawing admiring eyes before racing south into open countryside with a fierce departing growl.
‘Thank you!’ I push The Tempest’s throttle forwards again. ‘I bloody will!’ Crazy lady is going all the way.
23
Time Immemorial
The Tempest’s maximum speed is nine miles an hour – about the same as a leisurely cyclist – and that’s going some on a river, not to mention the fact it’s breaking the law, sending up a bow wave that would threaten to capsize every boat and waterfowl around us and drench bystanders. I risk six – the same pace you’d sprint for a bus – as we cruise away from Big Meadow, the village jetties on the opposite bank giving way to longer commercial mooring marinas, then out into open country.
The Avon is quieter here, no other river users in sight, the banks lush and protective. I’m bursting for the loo, forced to do a fidgety dance on the spot until I’m sure we’re clear of any human life.
Then I put her in neutral, tie the tiller in position, grab the abandoned mop bucket to scoop water from the river and head down the steps to the boatman’s cabin, through the bedroom berth and into the bathroom. Ed’s left it very neat, the wet towels folded in the shower, Ashwell’s Patent Toilet Lock dissembled in the soap holder, the basin cupboard open, its supply now switched off.
Oh, the relief of a proper toilet bowl! I use the river water to flush it, then make my way through the galley and saloon to the well deck to turn the diminished tank supply back on.
Lady watches me come and go while her puppies pounce on her wagging tail.
‘I have nothing to feed you,’ I tell her regretfully. ‘You badly need a vet check and a wash and so much TLC.’ I feel guilty for keeping them here, but I couldn’t have asked Mum and Dad to take them.
The puppies attack their mum’s tail with ever-more excited squeaks as the wagging speeds up. She looks at me intently. This, to me, is more TLC than I’ve had in a long time. I nod in understanding, and refill her water bowl, the kitchen tap now flowing again.
Then I remember the mini quiches.
In the chill box there’s also cold meats and cheeses, various pasta and rice salads and leftover lamb from Sunday lunch. Dear Mum’s determined I will run away with enough buffet food to host a small party on board. I feed Lady and her pups a selection. What was it Summer called her? Privileged White Dog? She is.
While I’m cramming the rest of the food in the fridge, the narrowboat lurches beneath me. The river current must have caught us up and made us drift. I hurry back up on deck, cursing myself for being fool enough to abandon the tiller. Another rookie error – she even has a river anchor although I can’t remember how to use it.
I’m surprised how far downstream she’s drifted. We have run aground in shallow water again. This time The Tempest’s hull is lodged on a raised section of riverbed away from the bank. I put the throttle into reverse, grateful the propeller’s not snagged. A few blasts of bow thruster and she dislodges into deeper water.
I consult the guide again. We’re on the final furlong before the last of today’s six locks, Marcliffe, which is hidden behind a sharp bend ahead of us. I’ve been on board very rarely when Paddy takes the boat this far.
My yearning for him spikes to fever pitch once more. Not because I can’t cope on my own – the narrowboat was easy enough to get moving this time – but because being alone with The Tempest once again gives me that strange sensation of stealing something of his soul, of being in a world where he is here and yet not here, a strange grief-state that echoes the loneliness I’ve felt in our marriage sometimes, particularly recently.
*
Mr and Mrs Hollander are not what we were. The closeness has shifted, from one love to another over many years, from that abstract heart and soul intensity that Summer is just starting to experience to something more pragmatic we only rarely examine, usually in extremis.
My menopause is extremis, I have no doubt of it, but not one it’s easy to communicate, least of all with a man.
It feels like failure, a loss of self and of control. In the same way his deep grief was locked into that part of him I cannot reach, this comes from a place that existed before we were us. Unlike marriage and babies and homes and jobs, this was always going to happen.
*
The weir is straight ahead, barricaded by floating barrels, the current pulling us towards it, the river’s force stronger every mile downriver we go.
I steer left into a deep corridor of slab-sided engineering. I haven’t checked with the Avon Navigation Guide as to how many prisoners laboured to create this lock, but it’s brutally industrial amid all this bucoli
c greenery. There’s nobody around to help. One top gate is open in welcome, thank goodness, a heron lifting off its rails as The Tempest enters.
I tie up and jump out to close the upper gate, grateful for the leg stretch, crossing and recrossing the footbridge, the shoulder-loosening focus of opening and closing paddles soothing me. Now that I’m alone in doing this, just as originally intended, I have a que sera sense of fatalism. Let Miles try and find me. I’ll just keep pressing on.
Just occasionally, these maddening hormonal mood swings have a way of catching an emotional updraught that’s close to an induced high. It’s glorious. I can feel the tension drop away from me. Not just the tension of this single madcap day, but the days and weeks leading up to it, the constant irritation and stress and fear. My new-found serenity glows brighter than any hot flush, and I realise I can anticipate the cool welcome of peace of mind ahead. Not here and now perhaps, but it is out there, and I can sense what it will feel like, can hear Mum’s voice reassuring me that it’s wonderful to be out the other side.
Waiting for the lock water to lower, I check my phone for messages, feeling a nervous jump to see there’s one from Paddy: Hi love, hope book recording going well. Neighbour is stark raving. Thanks for that. Nets later. Will call after. Sorry we rowed. P.
I could pick this apart in detail for hidden meaning but it’s already making my chest hurt to try.
Feeling a bit teary, I reply: Looking forward to it. I’m sorry too. Ex
I then WhatsApp the Hollander Fam group with an animated sloth group hug sticker; cheesy, but I’m limited on choice and time here and I want to reassure the kids all is well. (I don’t expect Paddy to read that one; he and WhatsApp stickers are never going to have a working relationship; simply mastering predictive text has almost destroyed his soul.)
I close my eyes and focus on the sound of water rushing from the lock, Paddy’s theme tune. I feel grateful for him with a force that shakes me.
Why do I keep questioning my behaviour with him, my integrity, how much I once wanted to please him and act happy, when the truth is that I’ve often behaved that way simply because that’s how he makes me feel? He’s my travelling companion through a life in which I have a habitual need to perform to earn my passage, yet he’s my free ride. A wedding’s just your ticket to love; it’s marriage that’s the journey.
*
When I was an impoverished student with no car and a whopping overdraft, I hitch-hiked fairly regularly, usually with a mate but sometimes alone if I had to.
Tell people that now and they say things like ‘Good God, you’re lucky to be alive!’ as though I stood in laybys with a handwritten card inviting passing motorists to enact a grisly murder in a handy industrial warehouse before distributing my mutilated body parts around dog-walking beauty spots. (Although since my children became teenagers, I’ve stopped arguing back that I was completely safe, and agree that it was pure madness.)
Thumbing a lift was entirely different to buying a train or coach seat amongst strangers and defending its priced-in solitude and silence with a Walkman and a book. Hitching a lift meant giving something back. Being a pretentious drama student, I sometimes made up characters, became a one-woman improvised show. I like to think retired lorry drivers still look back fondly at the hours they passed on the M1 with young Sadie the trainee undertaker from the Borders or Denise the Liverpudlian fire juggler.
Today, I’ve hitched a lift with a lot of different sides of myself, but there’s one I haven’t yet met, and being here alone in the boat has made me realise how much I’m looking forward to it, to introducing her into my life and to living that to the full. She’s the person I’ll be when menopause is over, when I have finished ‘changing’.
*
The sun is lowering from teatime to cocktail hour, hot and unsympathetic as I pilot The Tempest through the Vale of Evesham. We’ve long since passed the rip in the riverbank where swift River Arrow cuts into the bigger, slower Avon and the holiday park at Abbots Salford over which news helicopters love to hover whenever flooding threatens, its tightly packed caravans like a shoal of fish viewed from above. To our left is the long ridge of Cleeve Hill, a low wrinkle in the vast, flat vale, constantly disappearing behind the thickly wooded riverbank.
With each change of landscape, I feel a little less paranoid that my brother will appear, waving from the riverbank, telling me I’ve lost the bet. There’s nothing along this stretch bar trees and reeds and peace.
I need this solitude; I’m doing a lot of thinking.
Even though my craving for Paddy is reaching fever pitch, I love doing this bit on my own, feeling this connection with The Tempest without the constant well-meaning instruction, controlling something I’ve always dismissed as exclusively his. This old narrowboat is stitched into his life. I feel like I’ve borrowed his coat, just this once, to go out all by myself and, amazingly, it fits. She makes me happy too. Because Paddy makes me happy.
With Summer and Ed on board it was impossible to gauge the strength of this feeling, to know that it is still here, that no matter how many times it mutates and changes, it’s my bedrock. And it is more than simply companionship or parenthood, physical desire or old-fashioned romance, more than shared memories or home, more than friendship into old age.
I don’t even have a word for it (the Germans probably do because they have all sorts of clever ones like Drachenfutter for the guilty gifts we give to say sorry, as do the Japanese, like Yugen for a profound, mysterious sense of beauty in the universe). But in plain old British it’s just plain old love. Just that.
Forget nets. I message him. Look under your pillow, then look for me. Ex I turn my location sharing back on and pocket my phone.
*
Fair-mindedness is a quality I have learned to value as the most precious of all human gems. It’s no coincidence that I married a man who treats all his children equally, a quality innate to him.
Growing up, through my angstiest phases of self-doubt and sibling rivalry, I blamed many of my failings on my parents’ competitive favouritism, on having a Daddy’s Girl for a sister and Mummy’s Boy for a brother. It’s only through my own marriage and parenthood that I see how lucky I was, that we middle children have a rare balance, and that Jules and Miles had pressures of expectation far in excess of mine. I was the compensation: the arty daughter for Mum, the needy one for Dad.
I’ve sought balance throughout my life, the calm of equilibrium, of scales levelled by Lady Justice in her blindfold. My father and Jules, by contrast, like to quote American author William Gaddis: ‘Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.’ And Miles doesn’t care how poetic, rough or perverted in its course justice is, so long as it’s in his gift, in which case his generosity knows no bounds.
But let’s not forget that Lady Justice also carries a sword, too.
*
I hear it first: wasp-like, drone-like, only louder. Then I see it. A microlight: one of those ridiculous sewing-machine-meets-hang-glider contraptions only the maddest Baron von Munchausen adrenaline junkies ever try to master. Somebody like my brother.
What is he playing at?
My heart splutters with fear as I lift the binoculars to look closer. Take a moped and glue on wings and that’s what is headed this way. With Miles in it.
My brother might have been learning to fly for weeks and can take solo flights for practice, but he hasn’t passed his licence yet. If he has taken a microlight in search of The Tempest, it is unbelievably reckless, ill-thought-out and typical of him.
It’s swooping closer. Miles is laughing his head off.
‘Gotcha! Aarghhhhhhhhhhh!’ he flies past.
‘Miles, are you all right?’ I shout up. But he’s gone, disappearing over distant hedgerows.
There’s a long, peaceful, river-cruising pause during which I wonder if I imagined it.
Then he’s back.
‘Eliza… Arghhhhhhhhhhh!’ He flies by the other way.
‘MILES!’
He crosses the river just ahead of The Tempest, dipping frighteningly close to the water before pulling up and turning sharply, banking right then vanishing behind a row of poplars.
Please let him be gone, I pray, please let him be gone.
Far from issuing an impossible dare, he always knew I’d take her. Nobody knows the child in me as well as my brother. I usually adore it that he does.
Not this evening. Not even close.
‘Arghhhhhhhhhhh!’ Miles is back, following the river path now, heading straight towards the narrowboat.
The family’s sun king is out to eclipse me. Or should that be our Icarus? This is all the challenge was really ever about, I realise: an adrenaline rush for Miles is a lethal dose for anybody else. My little adventure is nothing to his great skyborne chase. He’s loving this, whereas I feel duped and silly.
I can’t possibly get away. There’s nothing but reed banks to either side of me. Travelling at 4 mph there’s no escaping the microlight at this close range.
Miles is still bearing down on us and shouting something I can’t hear. His reflective shades glint in the sun. The déjà vu hits me between the eyes. All I need is some Donizetti and an eighties haircut. This is like Paddy’s favourite scene in Travelling Man with the helicopter taking swipes at Harmony. Except that Miles looks terrified.
I put the boat in neutral and stop the engine. As I do so, the river goes eerily silent.
That’s when I realise the microlight engine has stopped too.
‘Arghhhhh!’ My brother swoops closer. ‘It’s STALLED!’
I throw the throttle to neutral and then scrabble up onto the roof, channelling Lomax, grateful at least that we’re not on Chirk Aqueduct.
‘Aim for a field!’ I scream. ‘Land it! You can do it!’
Behind the aviator sunglasses, I can tell he’s frozen with fright. There are tears. He passes overhead so close the updraft gives me a brief facelift. Then he veers right and loses height over a maize crop. Crows rise up, squawking furiously. There’s a lot of swishing and clattering and swearing and then the microlight disappears from sight and it all goes quiet.