Muddy Waters (3 page)

Leaving Adrian still deep in his dreams, Stella decided to make an effort towards preventing her own body sagging by taking a brisk row round the island before breakfast. Abigail's body, long, lean and streamlined as a racehorse, had always made her feel comparatively dumpy and lumpy – a feeling she suffered from with no one else, so it was probably merely a habit of envy left over from vulnerable youth.

The day was already promisingly warm and steamy, the new leaves on the trees gleaming like paint that wasn't quite dry. There was no sign of life yet from Peggy's barge – the last defiant one left after the council cancelled all houseboat moorings in preparation for the proposed building of a bridge and a general officious tidying up of the anarchic mess that surrounded the island. No resident of the island would admit to wanting a bridge across to the bank, seeing the proposal as a dodgy conspiracy that would end in higher house values and an immediate leap up three bands of council tax rating. Peggy, who had lived in her barge for at least ten years, simply had nowhere else to go. Rowing round the island was just far enough to make it feel like a good work-out, though Stella conceded that this was by the standards of a middle-aged woman with a sedentary occupation who hadn't participated in active sport since compulsory hockey at school. She tweaked at her fleshy hips guiltily as she walked down the garden, wondering how far up the scale of ‘letting yourself
go
' Abigail would rate her. She cast off the rope from her skiff and set out at a steady pace, hoping she wouldn't come across one of the super-keen members of the rowing club on the shore, showing up her lack of technique and hollering that the club was ideal for beginners and the social life was
terrific
.

The island was quite large by usual Thames eyot standards, about half a mile long and banana-shaped with a scruffy scrub and woodland wilderness at its north end. It was only about fifty feet from the east bank, with the main river channel on the west side, but as access was only by boat or ferry and subject to the whims of tide and tempest, it attracted creative and adventurous personalities rather than those whose idea of ‘waterfront' was a concrete seaside marina. Over the years, it had evolved into a predominantly artistic colony, partly because there was a subtly ruthless weeding-out system for potential house-seekers. Anyone who struggled off the ferry with an estate agent, a sheaf of house details and an air about them of having a nine-to-five job might find their would-be neighbours eager to discuss the disadvantages of an erratic refuse collection system and no milk delivery. The difficulties of hanging about during a high spring tide when the 7.33 to Waterloo might need to be caught would also be mentioned, quite casually, in passing. Stella sometimes felt that she and Adrian had only just slipped through the net, being mere writers. Charlotte, a painter with a red-headed toddler daughter, had once let it out that there had actually been a good deal of discussion about it three years previously when they'd been buying their house, making Stella imagine an official meeting and an unflatteringly close vote.

Stella and Adrian's house was probably the biggest on the island – one of four Edwardian houses on the side that faced out across the main stream and the flood meadows beyond. In summer, day trippers on pleasure boats cruised past and pointed, oohing and aahing enviously at the pretty roofs and balconies and the decoratively frilled wooden bargeboards and the cutouts patterned like broderie anglais, reminiscent of the days when a trip out to the river was, like in
Three Men in a Boat,
a very jolly and frivolous excursion. The rest of the island was dotted about with an odd mixture of weather-boarded bungalows and cabins that had probably originally been built as weekend retreats – some were little more than shacks (especially Willow's, whose flimsy tin-roofed dwelling was a hymn to primary colour and referred to as a
cabaña
). Most of these were perched ominously up on concrete piles facing the shore on the side closest to the ferry, with a less enviable view of the rowing club, a terrace of dilapidated boathouses converted into garages and some spare scrubland used by all as a carpark.

Stella's stately progress took her gliding past Fergus and Ellen MacIver's garden which was a thriving reminder that the island's resident-selection process occasionally slipped up. The MacIver's had moved in, installed a gleaming aluminium greenhouse, a B & Q plastic shed, built-in breeze-block barbecue and militarily straight rows of vividly clashing bedding plants before anyone realized their artistic taste ran to a liking for municipal park layouts. Everyone else, with casual and lazy artistry, went in for plants that rambled, tumbled and trailed in a deceptively dishevelled manner, in colours that blended and harmonized and gave the impression of spontaneous but sensitive disarray. Far more carping went on among the residents about the MacIver's prim planting schemes than about Enzo the sculptor's scrap metal collection strewn all over his scrubby patch.

Stella rowed on, feeling bad about being so snobbish. About
plants,
for heaven's sake, she thought. I mean, what's really so criminal about being fond of salmon pink geraniums alternated with soldier-stiff scarlet salvias? Bernard, whose home closest to the north tip of the island she was now rowing towards, would probably have some impressive colour-theory-based argument about that, she thought. He lived alone over a very large old boathouse, the lower part of which was supposed to be a gallery and had been opened with enormous enthusiasm and newspaper fuss a couple of years before, never again to see the number of visitors in total that had been there enjoying the free drink at the launch party. Bernard, a painter described in broadsheet culture sections for almost twenty years as up-and-coming, believed that art was a club exclusive to artists and art lovers, not for the casually cruising general public who'd run out of shops to browse round on a wet Sunday afternoon and so he did not encourage publicity. A poster advertising the gallery, tacked to the board beneath the ‘Private, Keep Out' sign by the ferry, had been removed and ‘lost' as soon as the council grant had been spent on renovating the boathouse and incidentally providing him with a large airy studio and living space. Outside and round about, as a decaying reminder of when the boathouse had been exactly that, rotting skeletons of abandoned cabin cruisers and a defunct ferry boat rusted in the undergrowth like the carcasses of elephants. As she rowed, feeling a rewarding muscular ache in her legs, Stella looked up at Bernard's enormous window opened on to the broad balcony and saw him standing there, block-shaped and solid, fingering his thick ginger beard and staring across at the trees and fields and distant tower blocks on the opposite bank, waiting for a fine-bodied female jogger to run along the towpath and inspire his day's painting.

‘Morning Bernard!' Stella called. She could hear him sigh even at that distance, as if she'd interrupted the final savouring of his last night's dream. She wondered if he, like Adrian, twitched and fidgeted in his sleep. She didn't expect a reply, being way over twenty and therefore way outside Bernard's range of interest, but he did manage a gracious, sleepy wave.

Up in her room, high in the roof where gulls gathered and peered in through the skylight at her while she slept, Ruth woke up and tried to work out what time it was and whether she'd got many classes to go to that day. She wanted to go to the Art Fair meeting at the boathouse with her mother after lunch, just so she could hang around close to Bernard and show off that she knew her way around his kitchen. Willow the dippy hippy would be just furious, being quite convinced, though Ruth couldn't think why, that Bernard was somehow
her
property. She got up and went straight to the mirror, as she did every morning, to see if spots had covered her chin in the night, springing up like mushrooms on a damp lawn. The ritual reminded her of when she was a small child on the coldest days of winter, reaching high up to pull aside her curtain in the daily joyful expectation of snow. Not that there'd be anything joyful about finding
spots,
she thought, inspecting her creamy skin carefully. ‘You have skin like the top of Jersey milk,' Bernard had complimented her once, running a rough finger slowly down her cheek and making her feel like simply purring.

‘What's Jersey milk, exactly?' she, a child of the semi-skimmed Nineties, had asked her mother later.

‘Thick, yellowish stuff,' Stella had said, unknowingly demolishing several hours of delirious near-perfect happiness, ‘rather out of fashion these days.'

Ruth checked through her timetable and found that although the morning (French and Media Studies) couldn't be missed, the afternoon art class could possibly take the form of research, perhaps a spot of photography towards her project on water life forms. It was a typical affectation, she thought, of Pansy Island, to hold the meeting in the afternoon instead of more conveniently in the evening, as if to show off that they were Artists, so they Could. This deliberately left out anyone dull enough to be holding down a proper job along with students with a conscience. She had every right to be at the meeting, being for the first time an exhibitor. Her second favourite fantasy was about having a major dealer browsing round the summerhouse on art fair day and discovering her jewellery, commissioning work for a London gallery and making her instantly famous. She went happily into the shower, lathered her generous soft curves with Body Shop vanilla gel and thought some more about Bernard. She squeezed her soapy hands hard into her skin, and thought about his shaggy lion-like head, imagining what it might feel like, bristling and chafing down between her thighs. It was such a pity he was called
Bernard
, she thought as she wrapped herself in a warm towel. For maximum charisma he really should be called something more bohemian like Pablo, or Lucien or, most blissfully perfect, Augustus. Bernard was hardly a name to fire the fantasies. She'd never come across a name like that among her contemporaries at the sixth form college – it just didn't fit in with Alex or Simon or Damien or Luke. It sounded so thoroughly middle-aged, but then, she reminded herself, that was exactly what he was.

Ted Kramer sat outside the rowing club in Philip Porter's dazzling white Nissan Micra, opened the window and wished miserably that he was at the evening end of the day and not the morning one. He breathed the cool, sharp early air and closed his eyes and blamed Philip Porter for being the cause of this fate-tempting sin of wishing away time. Never before had he met anyone whom he so hated to be in an enclosed space with, who was so obsessed with badodour obliteration. Philip Porter, who was in his bustling mid-career mid-thirties, carried a clashing reek of aftershave, deodorant and hair gel. His whole being and body screamed, it seemed to Ted, right into your face like a caricature sergeant-major: ‘I am CLEAN! What am I? CLEAN!' His scrubbed car smelt of vinyl polish and was equipped with scented hand-wipes, dangling air fresheners and a pair of polyester covers for the headrests. Ted, who kept telling himself he was far too old to care that early retirement was only a blink away, had an irritating childish urge to flake dandruff from what was left of his own hair all over the plush seats and tread dog muck into the meticulously vacuumed carpet.

‘Got to be vigilant. Got to get it all down on here,' Philip Porter muttered, consulting his clipboard and then glancing across to where the island slept peacefully and the ferry sat rocking gently on top of the receding tide.

Ted sighed again and looked across at the brightly painted shack owned, according to the electoral register, by one Wilma Doreen Ellis. It reminded him of hot Caribbean nights and the rhythmic cackle of tree frogs. He'd paint the cottage walls this summer, he decided, perhaps a deep, campion pink. People appreciated a bit of original colour down in Cornwall. It went with the sea air and the special light that blessed St Ives.

‘There's one,' Philip suddenly said, his head swivelling about excitedly like a train-spotter catching sight of a rare locomotive. Ted looked across without much interest and saw a woman rowing gently past, her face turned sunwards, looking, he thought enviously, as if she was savouring every perfect, private moment. He looked away quickly, feeling rudely intrusive as if he'd glanced over a garden wall and caught sight of a neighbour sunbathing naked. Philip Porter tapped the clipboard with his gold propelling pencil. ‘Which category, do you think, arriving or leaving, visitor or resident?'

‘Who cares?' Ted told him, ‘I really hate this spying on people.'

Philip frowned, ‘It isn't spying, it's
observation, feas-i-bil-ity.
' He droned the syllables out, as if their very length defined their importance. He clicked at the pencil impatiently. ‘It's bona fide council business.'

Ted Kramer watched the woman smiling as she glided swiftly past a group of swans.

‘Bona fide bollocks,' he said. ‘It's nobody's business.'

‘How was the river?' Adrian, pouring coffee and still looking half asleep, asked Stella as she staggered with exaggerated exhaustion into the kitchen.

‘Wet, would you believe?' she replied, flopping into the nearest chair. He looked slightly pained and she realized that it was still too early in the day for him to deal with even the gentlest sarcasm. He woke slowly and reluctantly from the twitching dreams, claiming that thinking up devious twists of pornographic plot kept him awake long into the night. Perhaps in the early sleepless hours he lay watching
her,
and possibly planning her murder, she thought as she reached across the table and poured herself coffee.

‘Sorry. No, it was lovely – flat and slow-moving and not quite woken up yet, rather like you.' She got up and kissed him lightly and delved into the bread bin (made by Willow) for a croissant.

‘Those two men were there again, the ones the council sent to watch who uses the ferry,' she told him. ‘A pretty boring job for them, sitting there measuring everyone's comings and goings.'