Among the essential comforts their customer took with him were a sleeping bag, binoculars, swimming shorts, pens and writing paper, clean clothes, a battery razor and ten books. Stowing all these safely, he stripped off his sweater, and in T-shirt, jeans and trainers jumped lightly onto the poling platform at one end of the boat. He looked young and unimportant and not in the slightest like the editor of any newspaper, let alone the vivid and successful Cotswold Voice.
He poled his flat craft along with an ease that had the boatyard staff nodding in approbation, and they watched him until he was out of sight round the first slow bend. Bill Williams, looking back across the fields to the small town with its church spire shining in afternoon sunlight, felt an enormous sense of release. There was nothing to clutch him, no crisis to demand his return to his desk: he had even deliberately not brought with him his mobile phone with its brigade of charged-up batteries, normally the first objects of his packing.
Two days earlier his Saturday edition — his last — had been a triumph, sold out. He’d used all the crowd-pleasing ideas he would in past years have spread over the autumn and with breath-shortening delight he’d sat in a pub window across the road from a large newsagent and in the early evening watched copy after copy of the Saturday Voice being carried away. Word of mouth in action, he’d thought. Absolutely bloody marvellous.
Quiet and contented on the river on Monday as the long August dusk lengthened, Bill Williams steered his unaggresive boat to a stretch of sweet-smelling bank, and tied a mooring rope to a sapling willow. The little sounds of water birds snuggling down for the night in a patch of reedbed, the whisper of the faintest of wind movement in dead and dry grass stems along the bank, the faint chuckle of the current as the river gently bypassed his inert boat, all the tiny natural things obliterated for a while the clamour of the raucous outside world that had to be dealt with and lived in, and if possible changed for the better. Long ago, to his surprise, young Dr A. E. da V. etc. had come to the self-knowledge that if a cause were just, he would kill for it.
Death on the Thames that week came no nearer than river-rage, with motorway bad manners spilling over into raised voices and shaken fists. The punt was slow. Fast fibreglass cruisers filled with holidaymakers in a hurry swept past with boom boxes thumping. Anglers sitting half-hidden on stools along the bank (patiently waiting to hook the uneatable) cursed the silent punt for dragging their lines. Lock-keepers stifled impatience while the boat with no rudder but a trailing punt pole manoeuvred difficult eddies at the entrances and exits of the locks.
Bill Williams, expert though he was, attracted abuse.
On the credit side he watched the sunsets after the busy river was quiet, and listened to geese honking on the meadows above Oxford, and ate at an inn with peacocks on the roof and once, half disbelieving, caught the bright blue flash of the wing of a rare kingfisher on the hunt.
He lived down among the moorhens with snapdragons and floppy poppies growing wild beside him. He floated eye-ball to eye-ball with bad-tempered hissing swans and was looked down on superciliously by alarmed herons who plucked up their feet fastidiously and stalked away.
By the time Bill Williams reached the public mooring at Oxford his mind was filled with amusement and his arms were fit and strong from swinging and leaning on the punt-pole. He had written a leading article (from habit) and read nine of his books.
He went ashore for food, and from a public phone called up the message service he used in his rare absences. Most of the messages were from disgruntled Voice readers as usual. There were no offers or even expressions of interest from any people who could give him a job.
In Oxford he bought as usual every local and London newspaper he could lay his hands on, and went back to the boat.
It was a Tuesday. He had been travelling down the river for eight undemanding days and would easily, in two days more, reach the restaurant for his dinner meeting with the conglomerate-proprietors. Much now, it seemed, depended on their assessment of him. He read their papers first.
There were two of them, the Blondel News and the Daily Troubadour, each split into two sections, with sport, art and finance coming second.
He knew of course that as broadsheets both papers took responsibility seriously and seldom bared a breast. He knew also that the fierce in-fighting with others in the circulation war had meant they’d sprouted off-shoots of glitz on Sundays. He considered that that Tuesday’s edition of the Troubadour was boring; and he found the same story (identical paragraphs) unforgivably printed on two different pages. He felt not in the least downhearted but more like taking the Troubadour by its complacent sloth and giving it a colossal shake.
Later, moored comfortably downstream in the dappled shade of a graceful willow, he read, with carefully throttled emotion, that day’s — Tuesday’s — Cotswold Voice. The previous week’s two editions, read in pubs upstream, had both partly carried his own recognisable imprint. This Tuesday’s issue, the third of the new owners’ reign, had wholly reverted to the shape of the old Cotswold Voice, before young da V. Williams got his hands on it.
Bill Williams sighed.
The racing writer of the Cotswold Voice was missing the little creeping blue-pencil bastard something chronic (as he put it).
He’d been immediately told by the new editor, a large man with a bullying manner, that in future the Voice would use a centrally written opinion piece as their leader on the racing page. The present racing writer would take second lead, and yes — grudgingly — as there still seemed to be no great fresh news, he could do a follow-up piece this week about Dennis Kinser and his syndicates, always supposing the Voice itself had succeeded in launching the Kinser training career. After that, the racing writer would do no more features, but concentrate on tipping winners.
Aggrieved, the racing writer phoned Dennis Kinser, and he and Dennis Kinser between them, prompter and prompted, concocted a totally false account of the new trainer being flooded by applications to take horses from excited would-be syndicate owners, thanks to the enthusiastic support of the Cotswold Voice.
The new editor nodded over the piece sagely and initialled it for publication. The ex-editor shook his head, and, knowing his racing writer and reading his Saturday gush in an up-river bar, didn’t believe a word of it.
Bill Williams floated down in two days from Oxford to the meeting-place, a restaurant by the river — imaginatively named Mainstream Mile — and in late afternoon sunshine tied his mooring ropes tidily to the pier provided. He agreed at once with his food columnist’s statement that, from the water at least, the dining-room of Mainstream Mile was one of the most attractive on the Thames, with tables set on terraces behind a sheet of glass, so that diners could have a grandstand view of river traffic.
There was a short patch of rose garden between the building and the river, with a path winding upwards from the pier. Down the path, as Bill Williams stood on the pier, stretching and relaxing in his jeans and T-shirt after his completed journey, a young dark-suited man bounced with a self-satisfied air and told the visitor to leave at once as he was not welcome.