Water Gypsies (11 page)

‘No.’ She looked away. ‘I’ve just got a bit of an upset tummy.’

He knew she found the life hard, especially since the children had come along, but in the past she had always reassured him about how much she loved him and how she would not exchange this way of life for any other. But something was eating away at her, he knew, and her quiet suffering made him feel tense and helpless. What should he say? How was he to understand her?

Hearing her sigh in bed, sensing the burdened spirit behind that small outrush of breath, he had reached for her, hoping to achieve with his touch what he could not seem to with words. He felt the comfort of her slight, strong body, his hand sliding over her breast, its soft rounded shape, utter pleasure to him. With his lips he found her neck, moving closer to her, wanting to love her, to give affection and comfort. He stroked her back, her breasts, his hand working downwards over her belly. As he eased his fingers between her legs, her voice burst into the darkness in a wail.

‘Oh, Joel,
please
don’t!’

She was shaking beside him, sobs breaking out of her like waves taking their time to reach the shore. Weeping brokenly, she turned her back on him.

Having no idea what to do or say, he pulled away, keeping only his hand on her back as she wept in an attempt at comfort, swelling inside with feelings of helplessness and rejection. When her crying abated, she fell into an exhausted sleep, leaving him restless and frustrated.

He stayed on the bank for a long time that afternoon as they set off along the Bottom Road. He bow-hauled the butty in and out of the locks, through Aston, amid the black, enclosing walls of that part of the cut, the towpaths clogged with oily filth and cinders and its narrow, slime-choked locks. Despite Bobby’s repeated offers to exchange places with him, and Joley hopping off to walk warily at his side, he worked on like a dynamo, coughing, working the paddles, tugging on the line to haul the butty, his spirit in turmoil.

Never before in their marriage had he felt this distance from his Maryann. There had been times when the poor, troubled child he knew, before she came back to him as a woman, had closed off from them all and sat sunk in misery. And on many occasions, amid the stress and physical struggles of the boating life, their tempers had crackled and exploded at each other. But that was temporary, was about something he could grasp the meaning of and was over in moments as the annoyance or danger passed. He had never before felt her to be so wholly distant, so completely wretched, and, as if she were his lodestar, he felt thrown off course and afraid.

Is it because she’s from off the bank?
he wondered. She
was
baffling at times. He often could not work out what was going on in her head. If he’d married a boatwoman born and bred, would it have been easier? Were they more straightforward, the women of the cut, having been known no other life? Was Maryann finally discovering that she couldn’t endure it any longer and secretly longing for a house and unmoving days on the bank?

Joel stood at Garrison locks as the water roared through the paddles. This was the filthiest, most demoralizing part of the whole journey. Overhead, railways criss-crossed over black, clattering bridges; warehouse walls hemmed them in on each side so that the rodent-coloured sky was almost out of sight altogether, but, like a grim reflection, several dead rats were bobbing in the cut amid the scum and oil of the water. A crewman from one of the joey boats waiting to come through the other way bawled along the path, waving his arm.

‘Get bloody moving will you?’ and Joel realized the water had levelled and he was still standing, staring.

Passing onwards, he tried to imagine any other life than the one he had known. His only time on the bank had been two years in the army, most of it away in France. He had volunteered the year after his mother’s death in 1916 in childbirth, when Ada was born. Joel’s twin brothers Ezra and Sam had already gone and he left his father and Darius to man the boat, and his sister Sarah to keep house and tend to Ada. Joel was nineteen when he left for France. By the time he returned with his injured lungs, both Ezra and Sam had met their deaths on the Somme without him ever seeing them again, and soon afterwards Sarah had died of the influenza.

Before France, Joel had a part-time sweetheart. Part-time in the sense that boating courtships were capricious affairs, meetings dependent on the movements of cargoes and criss-crossing of boats which might or might not meet. By the time he came wheezing home to what was left of his family, Clara had married one of the ‘joshers’ and gone to work the Grand Union. Very occasionally, he caught sight of her now, looking across from one of the orange and green Fellows, Moreton & Clayton boats, face hardened by work and weather. A stiff, restrained salute was their only acknowledgement that they had exchanged youthful kisses and – Joel had believed – promises in the Warwickshire meadows all those years ago.

The years after the Great War had been a time of survival for the Bartholomews. By then the family consisted of three men, all numb with grief, and one infant girl, Ada. Ada grew up to be an adept boatwoman. She had been ten years old when a dark-haired girl just a couple of years her senior, skinny as a foal and fiery with mutinous emotions, wandered up to the
Esther Jane
one white, frozen day and announced fiercely to Joel that her name was Maryann Nelson and always would be. Only years later, as a grown woman, had Maryann consented to change her name to Bartholomew, and Joel knew what a store of trust she had invested in him.

He knew it wasn’t easy marrying into his way of life, which, before the war began, had been under threat. The boaters kept moving their cargoes, pushing onwards, knowing that if they didn’t shift a load they wouldn’t get paid, whatever the season, whatever the weather. For Joel, boating was the life he knew in every cell of his body. Any length of time walking in city streets, caught between high buildings and away from the veins of the cut, made him feel fidgety and lost. Family history was a matter of word of mouth, with nothing written down, nor, until his marriage to Maryann, had any photographs ever been taken of his family. Now a framed photograph of that day, him smiling joyfully beside his young bride, hung in the cabin of the
Theodore
amid the ribbon-threaded plates. What he did know, though, was that for at least three generations, back into the haze of those days when Queen Victoria was a young bride herself, Bartholomews had worked the cut and, in particular, the Oxford cut. Joel’s landscape, inner and outer, was marked by winding contours, the black and white beams of locks, the graceful tilt of road bridges which leaned aside to let them past, by those soft, green hills. On that cut, for as long as anyone could remember, they had been Number Ones, working their own family boats, and Joel longed deeply to be a Number One again, for his sons and daughters to work the cut and to feel the dignity and self-respect which had been owned by the previous generations. And he could feel it slipping away from him.

Maryann, too, was so much a part of him now that her deep unhappiness weighed him down. What was troubling her? What could he do to lighten her, to make her smile again?

That night they found a place to stop at Minworth, out beyond the aerodrome. When he went to the
Theodore
after tying up, the three older children were out on the bank. From inside he could hear what sounded like both the twins crying. Timidly, he looked down through the hatches. Maryann was sitting opposite the stove, where bacon was frying in a pan, the fat spitting loudly. In a bowl nearby rested five eggs. She leaned forward to jerk the pan by the handle, her face white and impassive. His heart went out to her. He knew it was hard, that she had so much to do. But that was the life, wasn’t it? That was how it was.

He climbed down and squatted on the coalbox and the screams battered his ears. Maryann didn’t even look at him.

‘Pass us one of them over,’ he suggested.

Maryann leaned over and lifted an irate Ada into his arms while she latched Esther onto her breast, still jiggling the pan with one hand.

‘We’ve got out through there, anyway,’ Joel said. It was always a relief to get past that bit of the cut, even though soon they would reach the coalfields, where everything, landscape and people, was blackened by its dust. He spoke feeling nervous of her, though. He could tell there was something coiled up inside her.

Maryann nodded, still not looking at him. She leaned forward and flipped the rashers over with a knife.

‘You all right, little mate?’ he asked eventually.

She turned to him then, and in her eyes, for a second he saw a look of utter desperation. But then, by a miracle of will, a smile appeared on her face.

‘Yes,’ she assured him. ‘Course. Tea’s nearly ready. Tell Bobby, and the others, will you?’

Eleven

Maryann found herself jerking into consciousness now before dawn, sweating from her dreams. There was a recurring one in which the boats were tied up at Lime-house dock. Maryann was standing on the bank, her boots poised at the edge of the wharf, watching the tide go out, the sea sucking the water back rapidly, boats sinking deeper and deeper down until they seemed much further away than they would be in reality, tiny specks of colour at the foot of the grey wall with its clinging weed and slime. Round them stretched a sea of thick, oozing mud. She felt herself launch forwards over the edge, down, down, knowing that she was going to land smack across the empty hold of a boat and that her belly would pop open like a seed. Except it was the sickening feeling of falling which woke her every time so she never reached the bottom but woke, gasping.

God forgive me,
she thought, lying trembling beside Joel’s hot, oblivious body.
Just let me be free of it this one time. I’ll be able to manage another babby later on, but they’re all so close together. I can’t. I just can’t.

As the days passed, Maryann knew she had to act. Fear held her back. What was she going to do? If only there was someone she could go to, someone kind like Sister Mary to whom she could pour out all her troubles. But they weren’t going down through Stoke Bruerne, and in any case, how could she ever go to Sister Mary and admit what was on her mind? That she had reached such a pitch that she wanted to do away with her baby?

But if I’m going to do it, I’ve got to get on with it,
she kept saying to herself. She could think of nothing else. The thought of it, the dread of childbirth, of another child to cope with possessed her. And supposing it was twins again! In front of Joel and Bobby she tried to act normally, to be cheerful and hide her sickness, though she was constantly pale and strained and she knew Joel had noticed. When she denied that anything was wrong, though, he didn’t press her.

Her thoughts wouldn’t leave her alone. The cold, closed-off feeling returned, which had come over her when she had run away from home as a young girl and come to Joel and his father on the cut. It had been like that later, for a time, after baby Harry died. If only she could tell Joel how she felt. But that was completely out of the question. If he knew what was in her mind …Well, she couldn’t bear to think how he would react. She felt more desolate and alone than she had for years.

The easiest way, she thought, would be water with pennies boiled in it. And she slipped into a chemist in Birmingham for pennyroyal syrup. Both tasted vile and made her even more sick, but neither had any result at all. She couldn’t bring herself to jump, or pretend to fall, not like in the dream. She knew she’d never have the courage. There was only one way left now that she could think of, and a cold shudder of fear passed through her every time she thought about it.

They were on their way south now with coal for Oxford. It was a while since they’d been down there and Joel was pleased, as it meant meeting up with family. By the time they left the coalfields, the grit catching in their nostrils, clothes and hair, the family were all as black and begrimed as ever, especially the children. Maryann felt another deep wave of despair. They looked like a load of chimney sweeps! The old taunt of ‘dirty families’ haunted her. But how was anyone supposed to keep clean in these conditions, especially feeling the way she did?

Joel and Bobby had sheeted up and put the top planks up over the hold. As well as keeping the rain off, the tarpaulins stopped so much gritty dust from blowing back in their faces.

On the way south they found themselves followed closely by another pair of Barlow boats occupied by the Higgins family, whose son Ernie crewed for Darius. Mrs Higgins was an older woman – it was impossible, Maryann thought, to guess exactly how old – with a wizened, leathery face and a terse but not unpleasant manner. She had a scarf dotted with brightly coloured flowers tied over her hair and her forearms were as knotted and muscly as branches.

‘You going down the paper mills then?’ she asked as they were untying. When Maryann said they were, Mrs Higgins shook her head.

‘Ah well, watch that there river. can be a booger down there.’

They knew she was right. To reach Wolvercote paper mills they had to go through the lock at Duke’s cut and onto the Thames. There was nowhere to turn the boats at the mill, so they had to wind them on the wide Thames and take them down backwards on the rushing current. Maryann never did that part of the trip without her innards turning with fear, and most other boatwomen were prepared to admit that they felt the same.

‘Least I’ll get a good wash done, though,’ Maryann said. There was plenty of hot water on offer at Wolvercote Mill and most of them tried to get their wash tubs out.

Mrs Higgins gave her a sudden, gappy smile. ‘That you will,’ she agreed. ‘We’re off to the aloominum works, down Banbury.’

With the Higginses on their tail so much of the way south, Maryann felt somehow on display, even though they were as respectful of the privacy of others as anyone could be. But for the first two nights they were all tied up nose to tail along the bank and Joel went out for a drink with Mr Higgins the first night, while Mrs Higgins stayed aboard with the two youngest children, who still worked the boats with them.