‘I say, hold this rope, will you?’ Peter said. I took the wet snake he offered. ‘Hi,’ he added, seeing me properly for the first time, ‘Who are you?’
‘Anybody’s guess,’ I said with more truth than sense, and his mother stared at me with astonishment and told him my name.
Keeble came back on board and started the engine. Teller stood up on the small forward deck and cast off the bow rope when Keeble told him, and Peter left it until almost too late to leap on board with the stern. The camera bounced on the cord round his neck. ‘Birthday present from Gran,’ he said to Lynnie with pride. ‘Super, isn’t it.’
‘You’ll drop it in the river, if you aren’t careful.’
‘This is only my second film. I used the first one up on the boys at school. Do you think those ducks will come out all right?’
‘I expect you had your finger over the shutter.’
‘I’ve got a book in there.’ He nodded to the cabin, expertly sifting out the affection behind her sarcasm and showing no resentment. ‘It tells you about exposures and focuses. I think I’ll just check what it says about sunny days. It was cloudy dull all week at school.’
I don’t belong here, I thought. I wished I were asleep.
The Flying Linnet nosed upstream through a scatter of row-boats, Keeble at the wheel, Teller sitting forward still on the cabin roof, and Peter trying to get past Lynnie teasing him in the cabin doorway. Joan Keeble sat down on the wide seat across the back and patted the place next to her for me to join her. With an effort I did so, but after a minute or two, in the middle of apparently idle hostessy chat, she pulled me back to attention by trying delicately to find out who I was and why I had been invited, while not wanting to have me realize that she didn’t know.
I could play that sort of game for ever. Inference on inference. I didn’t know the answer to why was I there, but that she needed to ask it, that indeed she had asked it, told me a great deal about non-contact between Keeble and his wife, and opened new doors on to Keeble himself. I knew then why he’d never before asked me home. It was one thing to employ a microscope, but another to put oneself under the lens. I thought it all the odder that he’d done it now.
As if he could feel my mind on the back of his neck he turned round and said, ‘The lock’s just ahead.’ I stood up and joined him, and Peter gave up his struggle and went back to his duty with the stern rope.
‘Marsh Lock,’ Lynnie said, standing beside me and looking forward through the windscreen. ‘Not an easy one, from this side, going upstream.’
When we got nearer I saw what she meant. The broad stretch of river narrowed abruptly to the lock gates on the left and the weir on the right, alongside. Baby whirlpools and trails of bubbles met us fifty yards away, with larger eddies and convolutions bubbling up as we went on. The boat tended to swing sideways under their power, and Keeble spun the wheel rapidly to keep her straight. Ahead of us water in tons tumbled over the weir, green and brown and splashing white, thundering down in great curving leaps, smelling of mustiness and mud.
A low wooden wall divided the lock approach from the turbulent weir water, and to the calm side of the barrier Keeble neatly steered his boat. Teller standing at the bow threw his rope over the hook on a mooring post there, and Peter slung a loop over a bollard at the stern.
I looked idly over the side of the boat, over the wall, up to the weir. Bouncing, tumbling, foaming, sweeping away back into the width of the river, the rough water looked superb in the sun. I felt the warmth and the fine spray mixed on my face and wondered whether if someone fell in there, he would ever come up.
The lock gates opened, the downcoming boats chugged out, and the Flying Linnet went in. Teller and Peter did their stuff mooring us to the side and Peter took a photograph of the boat in the lock. Water surged through the sluices in the upper gates, lifting us up, and in ten minutes we were going out of the lock on to another broad calm stretch of river, six feet higher than the one below.
‘There are fifty locks on the Thames,’ Keeble said. ‘Lechlade is as far up as you can go except in a rowing boat, and that’s about 300 feet above sea level.’
‘Quite a staircase,’ I commented.
‘The Victorians,’ he nodded, ‘were a brilliant lot. They built them.’
Teller stood up on the foredeck holding the coil of rope, the peak of his baseball cap pointing forward like an attentive bird. I watched him, speculating, and Keeble followed the direction of my eyes and gave me only silence to work on.
Less than half a mile upstream from the lock we made an obviously pre-arranged stop at a riverside pub, Teller jumping ashore with his rope and fending the boat off the concrete edges as we drifted towards it. He and Peter tied expert knots, and everyone followed them ashore.
We drank sitting on a ring of uncomfortable metal chairs round a table with a sun umbrella spiked through its centre. Lynnie and Peter had Cokes and without consultation Keeble bought Scotch for the rest of us. Joan sipped hers with a pursed mouth and screwed eyes, as if it were a mite too strong for fragile little her, but I noticed she finished a long way first. Teller left his untouched for several minutes and then tossed it back in kingsized gulps. Keeble drank in pauses, revolving his glass in his hands and squinting through it at the sun. They were talking about the river, and other days on it, and other weather. On either side of us, round more umbrellas, sat more family parties much the same; Sunday morning drinks, Sunday lunch, Sunday snooze, Sunday Express, Sunday supper, Sunday Night at the London Palladium... safe little families in a sheltered routine, well-intentioned and more or less content. Even Keeble fitted in. Whereas I... was apart.
‘Drink,’ Keeble said. ‘You’re on holiday.’
Faced with instant sharp curiosity from the rest of his family I meekly picked up my glass, still full when theirs were empty. It felt wrong to drink in the morning; it raised sub-conscious bells of alarm. I liked the taste of alcohol all right, but couldn’t afford its effects. Alcohol encouraged you to put your trust in luck, and I was better off trusting a clear head. Consequently I sometimes didn’t touch the stuff for weeks on end, and on that morning had had none for nearly a month.
Keeble watched me swallow the whisky, as vivid and familiar as a long-lost friend. The extent to which I was ever on holiday lay in the jacket across my knees, a pound of deadly mechanism in an under-arm holster; but it did seem most unlikely that I would need it on the Thames. When Teller ordered a refill, I drank that too. And then, since it was my turn, a third.
Peter lasted the course to three Cokes, and then wandered away with his camera poised, looking for excuses to use it. Next door a boatyard, like the one at Henley, was doing a roaring trade in punts. Four of the pub’s more enthusiastic customers were having trouble stepping aboard, and Teller said chuckling, ‘What’s the fine for punting under the influence...?’
‘A soaking,’ Lynnie said. ‘Silly nits.’
The punt pole waved recklessly as they set off, but the four men didn’t fall in. The punt skidded ten feet up the river and hit the pub’s landing stage with a thump that tumbled them into a leg-waving heap. I tried to laugh with everyone else and only succeeded in feeling more remote than ever.
We finished the drinks, re-embarked, and went up through the next lock, Harbour, to an unpopulated green-pasture stretch of river, where we moored for lunch. Peter swam, jumping off the boat repeatedly in glittering splashes, and Lynnie helped her mother in the cabin, preparing the food. Teller sprawled lazily on the back seat, and Keeble sat down with a Sunday newspaper and unfolded it, and I wearily began to wonder just when he would come to the point.