Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (9 page)

When I sail the
Phyllis May
in reverse there is snaking and roaring and smoke and sometimes I get a good crowd. I covered the hundred yards to the moored boat and stopped in a whirlpool of foam. The couple tying things on the roof looked at me. Elizabeth Jane, I shouted, oh ho, well done. There were giants in those days, eh? The Inland Waterways Association and all that—Tom Rolt the dreamer, and Aickman the activist. Hated each other of course. And Elizabeth Jane Howard—campaigned for years with Aickman, snuggled up in his narrowboat. She was married to Peter Scott but he preferred blokes half the time so she took up with Aickman but he was mad half the time so she married Kingsley Amis but he was drunk half the time. Always got it wrong, Elizabeth Jane. Absolute cracker—good writer too—could have had anyone in London. In fact she had one or two. All those toffs and artists after the war knew each other of course. And fancy you calling your boat after her—marvellous idea—I agree we must show respect.

Elizabeth Jane is my wife’s name, said the gentleman on the boat. We don’t know any of your friends. He and his wife went inside their boat and drew the curtains. I dropped into forward gear. It had started to rain, and it was still raining when we got to Oxford a fortnight later.

ST. BARNABAS IN JERICHO TOLLED THE SMALL hours and I stared at the ceiling. I had been reading a life of the novelist Angus Wilson, who took a hundred pages to go mad and go incontinent and die. At breakfast Monica said I’m bored. Yes, I said, I think I am too.

The rain won’t stop, said Monica, we’ve got colds and we can’t breathe and we can’t run, we’re getting fat, it’s freezing and the wind is blowing us into the bridges. The towpaths are muddy, the grass and trees are soaking, the spring flowers have drowned. I can’t move the lock beams because I’m too little, the lift-up bridge lifted me up into the air, I dropped your new aluminium lock key and your best flowered jug over the side. The cut is deserted and lined with rotting boats, the pubs in Thrupp wouldn’t have Jim, the fish restaurant in Jericho didn’t have any mussels, the mussels I bought in Oxford market were off, we have run out of logs and I miss my kids and my grandchildren and my friends in Stone. There is no one to talk to and no one has rung us and no one has e-mailed us and I’m frightened about crossing the Channel. We could be months in London, like a dentist’s waiting room. We’ve done this canal before, we’ve stayed in Oxford before. You wanted to live full-time on the boat—you must be mad. I’ve got cabin fever. When I go, which could be quite soon, I want to be cremated—I’ve had enough of wooden boxes.

I know, Monnie, I said, but Isis lock may be the last narrow lock ever—you can throw away the lock key—I mean the one you haven’t already thrown away. We’ll scarper down to London on the current—the Thames will look different going south. We’ll see friends and the weather will change. In a few weeks we could be on new canals, in a new country, with a new language and a great new adventure.

If we don’t bloody drown, said Monica. She started to cry, and Jim started to cry. Let’s go to the pub, I said, and Jim stopped crying.

In the Old Bookbinders they brought a bowl of water for Jim and they sold scratchings and Greene King IPA and had peanuts in a barrel and good white wine, and a young man who lived on a boat asked about our journey and told Monica she was very brave. I bought him a pint and he explained that although he was not in a position to buy one back he could offer us good karma for the crossing.

AT ISIS LOCK IT WAS GOODBYE THE NARROW world. Three generations of a French family leaned over, chattering, as we dropped into the river. I told them in French we were going to Paris but it came out wrong and they replied in English that the weeks of rain were over.

Near Folly Bridge a rat swam by—not a water vole, a rat. He was desperate. I was so sorry and wondered if he was leaving the
Phyllis May
. But Monica was waving from the bow and Jim was on the roof and the sun was shining. A couple of American girls on a bridge—Where are you going? Paris, I said, and they shouted Oh my Gard oh my Gard, and Have a nice trip.

At Abingdon on our mooring a varnished dinghy coughed alongside. It had a wood-coated boiler, a coal fire, a chimney, and lots of tubes. There was room for a gentleman in overalls who was spinning little wheels and pushing levers. I thought I’ll ask him if he will make me a cup of tea from his boiler and we will have a laugh together and then I thought I bet everyone asks him that and he will take offence and it will spoil the day and give us bad karma and we’ll drown in the Channel.

Is it nineteenth-century? I asked. No, he said, I finished it on Thursday. It’s lovely, I said. I made it all up, he said. See that flask on the side of the boiler? That’s my kettle. That’s where I make my tea. Not too much milk for me, I said.

We moored by an old orchard, a cruiser behind us. We are going to Goring, I said. Oh, we live there, said the man on the cruiser. There are three pubs—one is very good, one is not bad, and one is worse than the others.

Jim and I went to the worse one. It was like a normal pub, but worse. At the bar was a thin chap with a ponytail and dark glasses. My best friend had a dog, he said. The dog was sixteen, and he was blind, and he was deaf, and he couldn’t walk very well. Coming down the stairs he used to fall most of the way so they put a duvet at the bottom. With a bit of luck, I said, one day Jim and I will share a duvet.

A powerful man in his forties, in a dark jacket and an earring, came in, and his dad, who looked the same but younger. Dad watched Jim finish his bag of scratchings and then he went down on his hands and knees and Jim put his paws on his shoulders and licked his face. They don’t get any fatter, said Dad—I used to have one and people made remarks. I said Jim can’t handle food—I gave him a second bag of scratchings last night and he was sick.

Have you been blind for long? asked Dad. I’m not blind, I said, I can see. Son bought a bag of scratchings which he gave to Jim. I’m a landscape gardener, said Dad—I was in an office and now I’m free, but it’s hard in the winter. He bought a bag of scratchings and gave it to Jim.

They got up to go. You haven’t drunk your beer, I said. Never mind, said Dad, I don’t. Have you been blind for long? They both shook me by the hand and said how much they had enjoyed our conversation and Jim stood up tall and they kissed him.

AT CAVERSHAM BY READING AS WE LAY, THE back of the boat filled with greasy water. The engineer from the boatyard explained that I had forgotten to tighten the nuts that stopped water coming in where the drive shaft goes out to the prop. We had been taking in water all the way down and the bilge pump had worn out. He knew the famous adventurer who had gone across in a narrowboat. He had his air intake up here on the roof, said the engineer, and his exhaust up here too, so the waves couldn’t get in.

But my exhaust is only inches above the water, I said, and I don’t know where my air intake is. To be honest I don’t know
what
my air intake is. He showed me. It was a pipe on the side of the engine, low down. I’m worried about the exhaust, I said. It’s OK, said the engineer, there’s a U-bend.

If the adventurer had his exhaust up here there must have been a reason, I said to Monica a couple of days later. I don’t think I have gone into it enough. I can’t get it out of my mind. It’s keeping me awake. A big wave will swamp the engine through the exhaust and we’ll go sideways and she’ll roll and the windows will come in and we’ll drown. But the boatyard said there is a U-bend, said Monica. The Principal of the Sea School said there is a U-bend. But why did the adventurer have it on the roof? I said—there must be a reason.

It’s the fear, said Monica. Remember what you were like before you went on a big research job overseas. It’s really about the big thing but the fear gets you on a small thing and you rush around looking for a lefthanded camera or an exhaust on the roof. We used to call it displacement activity. This is worse, I said—this is like falling apart from the inside.

WE WERE GETTING NEAR NOW, AT MAIDEN-HEAD. We rang the Teddington lock-keeper about our passage down the tidal Thames to South Dock. The Thames Barrier has been up a lot this spring, he said. There has been rain and the tides have been bad. You are not going to have an easy trip—the piers and pontoons have been swept away. Perhaps you can slip in at Limehouse, hang on the wall and then go down to South Dock on the next tide.

Around the horizon there were headlands of cloud, and cliffs of rain. We sailed from downpour to downpour, and the electric silences between were lit by rainbows. Storms of swifts, devil birds, buzzed us like Messerschmitts. A ragged cormorant blundered into the air. Monica was still not well—the locks and bridges had pulled her muscles and she ached with fever.

When we reached Teddington I called at the lock-keeper’s cottage. The answers to your questions, he said, are free mooring tonight, the Tide End round the corner, and six o’clock tomorrow morning.

The barmaid in the Tide End was the one on the left in Atomic Kitten, the one with the eyelashes, the one that makes you go all wobbly in the knees. Jim and I sat down next to an old man. My brother had whippets, he said. They were big whippets, bigger than your whippet. But whippets are small, I said. There’s no such thing as a big whippet—they must have been greyhounds. No, he said, they were whippets, the big ones, bigger than him. I was a sailor. I was stuck on the Goodwin Sands. It took three tugs to pull us off—it’s a graveyard.

A creature walked out between the stools and legs at the bar. It was an English bull terrier, not much taller than Jim, but built like Staines Town Hall. She’s called Samantha, said her master, she’s all right. I thought—Just as well, she could throw him over her shoulder. You can call her Sam, he said. Sam was white, with a black spot on her nose and black ears. Her head was shovel-shaped, and the muscles of her jaws reached halfway down her back. She was slitty-eyed, and her eyes were on the top of her head like an alligator. She reminded me of a girl I knew who used to play hockey for Yorkshire.

Sam licked Jim’s nose and nibbled him behind the ears and rubbed her shoulders against him. Jim backed under the table. Would they like a drink? asked Atomic Kitten. Jim drank, but Sam would not, so her owner poured a pint of lager into the bowl. Sam emptied the bowl in one draught and looked around the room for Jim, and set out towards him, moaning. Jim hid behind the ironwork, his eyes wide. She’s all right, said her master, throwing his weight on the lead. Like a graveyard, said the sailor as we left.

I did miss you tonight, Monnie, I said, you would have loved Samantha.

AT SIX O’CLOCK TOMORROW MORNING THE tide was against us, with half an hour to run. Here we were in a new-washed dawn, going towards the sea.

Twickenham and Richmond offered woods to sail through, doubled in the river. The tide had flooded the parks and I could hear the bells of drowned churches. The current went slack and then it began to run out and we went faster and faster into the sunrise. There were no other craft except racing shells like long-legged flies—singles, pairs, fours and eights. They came out of the blazing river and went any way they wanted, but we missed them as far as we could see.

In your own boat the seventeen-mile journey to Limehouse, under the bridges of London, is a thousand-dollar ride. The day brightened and a wind nudged us as we sailed downstream. Through the parks of Kew and Chiswick and a long sweep down the boat-race course to Hammersmith, where the river is wide and the bridge carries the road on cables slung from its shoulders.

On the right the Star and Garter at Putney, where I would come off the river and rub my swollen wrists and drink beer and joke with the lads from our eight and put sixpence into a machine with a glass bowl on top. It filled my hand with warm peanuts and I could taste the salt, fifty years later.

Hammersmith Bridge is a rugby forward, but the Albert Bridge is satin and lace—slim Gothic towers, the fairest of them all. The tide was running mad, climbing the pillars of the bridges and streaming for a hundred yards behind. It was windy now: waves splashing. A vessel came behind us, a water taxi, at forty miles an hour. We were going under Chelsea Bridge so I couldn’t turn into the wake and it yanked at the tiller, nearly sending me into the tide. The
Phyllis May
flung from side to side, hit by the reflection from the river walls, and then by the second bounce.

Battersea Bridge, illuminated by monks in green and curling gold; Vauxhall orange and red, twisted from steel, a painted toy. Behind it the MI6 building. MI6 is a secret organization and it is now known that the arrogant heap in Vauxhall is paint and plaster, set by the river to deceive our enemies. The real headquarters is in a bunker underneath Rugeley—the entrance is through the curtain at the back of the Oxfam shop.

Clouds were coming down as we passed the Houses of Parliament, but the early sun still fired the gold on Big Ben and the dewdrops on the London Eye, the spider’s web over the river. On the Jubilee Footbridge a line of people walked across the sky.

I slowed down because we didn’t want it to end, but here we were at Blackfriars, then Tower Bridge, then at the Tower of London, then we were swept past Limehouse lock. I turned and crossed the stream, which wanted very much to carry us out to sea, and pushed back against the current. Soon we were stationary along the wall before the lock, the engine balancing the tide, the water hurrying under us. Then I put my money on the engineers of Bordeaux, gunned the engine and went hard right. The prop shuddered and bit the water, and with a great noise I took the boat straight into the corner pocket.

The new lock-keeper said to Monica That wasn’t bad—narrowboats get caught across the entrance—but I wouldn’t go down to South Dock this afternoon. The tide is coming in against the wind.