Full of resolve, now, I went back into the kitchen, locked the French window, took one more pitying look around the sitting room as I passed through it, and then left the flat for good, locking the door behind me. I felt a strange, irrational flood of relief, as if I’d just had a narrow escape from the jaws of some fate so imprisoning and nightmarish that it couldn’t even be defined.
‘Mumtaz and I were just trying to decide where we should go to lunch,’ Miss Erith said, as I rejoined them and took a welcome sip of my still-warm tea. ‘We can’t just go to any old place, you see. I don’t know what he thinks about it, but it’s a date, as far as I’m concerned, and a girl expects to be taken somewhere special.’ She glanced at the blue ring binder on my lap. ‘So – did you find what you were looking for?’
‘Yep. I think these are some of Dad’s poems and things. Apparently he’s lost the other copy and now this is the only one.’ I glanced through the pages, and saw that there were two sections: one in verse, the other in prose. ‘Don’t know why it’s so important. I suppose I’d better hang on to it. Weird title,’ I added, looking at the first page. ‘Two Duets.’
‘Hm, I see,’ said Miss Erith. ‘Half of Eliot.’
‘Half of Eliot?’
‘T. S. Eliot. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?’
‘Of course I have,’ I said, defensively. Then added, just to make sure I was thinking of the right person: ‘He wrote the lyrics for Cats, didn’t he?’
‘His most famous poems are the Four Quartets,’ she said. ‘Have you never read them?’
I shook my head. ‘What are they about?’
She laughed. ‘You’d have to read them to find that out! Oh, they’re about time, and memory, and things like that. And they’re all themed around the four elements – air, earth, fire and water. Your father was a great admirer of Eliot’s. We used to argue about him all the time. Not my cup of tea, you see. Not my thing at all. He was an anti-Semite, apart from anything else, and you can’t forgive something like that, can you? At least I can’t. But that sort of thing wouldn’t have bothered your father. He’s got no interest in politics, has he?’
‘Well …’ I had never really thought about this, I must say. And besides, I wasn’t very interested in politics either. ‘We never really talk about stuff like that. Our relationship is sort of based on … other things.’
Miss Erith was closing her eyes, now. I wondered at first whether she was about to nod off, but it seemed that this was an attempt at recollection instead.
‘The point is,’ she said, ‘that I’m an old lefty, and always will be. Ever since I started reading George Orwell and E. P. Thompson and people like that. Whereas your father had no political awareness at all. That’s why it’s probably a good thing that we never went on our trip together, because we were going into it for completely different reasons.’
‘You were planning a trip?’ I asked politely, hoping this wasn’t going to trigger a long reminiscence.
‘There was a book called Narrowboat. Quite a famous book in its day. Rolt was the author’s name – Tom Rolt. I’ve still got it on the bookshelf over there. He and his wife bought this narrowboat back in the thirties and lived on it for a few months, going up and down the canals. Then he wrote all about it and he published this book in the 1940s and the amazing thing about it is that it mentions my father’s shop: because I grew up on the canals, you know, and my father used to have a shop at Weston, where all the barges used to stop every day. He sold everything: every kind of rope and line you could think of, every kind of food, all sorts of tobacco, and then lamps, crockery, saucepans, clothes – you name it. And shelves and shelves of sweets for the children, of course. Such an Aladdin’s cave, it was! And the boats used to be stopping all the time, we got to know all the canal folk – it was a whole world, a different world, a secret world, with its own codes and rules. Just a tiny little shop, the front room of a thatched cottage in a row of other cottages, and I must have served behind the counter from when I was about eight or nine years old. Dad would have been amazed to know his shop was mentioned in this famous book but of course he didn’t read books like that – or any sort of book, really – so he never knew anything about it. And I didn’t find out until years later. I left home when I was sixteen, you see, to be with this man – a bargeman he was, naturally – and a year later I’d had my first baby and we left the canals and started living not far from here, in Tamworth, but we never got married – that was a bit of a scandal, I can tell you – and a couple of years later we had another baby and then this man left me. Well, I booted him out, if you must know, because he was a dead loss, really, never got a job or anything, used to spend all his time down at the pub or chasing other women – after a while I decided he was more trouble than he was worth. So there I was, in the early 1950s, living all by myself in a poky little flat with two small children, and the only thing I could do to stop myself from going crazy was to start reading. Of course I’d hardly had any education to speak of, but the Workers’ Educational Association was very strong, in those days, and I used to go to lectures and meetings and all sorts of things. And actually I did manage to go to university in the end, but that was when I was almost forty and so that’s another story entirely. Anyway, that was how I started reading books and I can’t remember how old I was when I read Narrowboat but I know that my mum and dad were both dead by then because I would have loved to tell them that their shop was mentioned in the book and I never did.’
While she was pausing for breath, Mumtaz said: ‘Do try to keep to the point, Margaret. You were supposed to be telling us something about Max’s father. Now none of us can remember what you were talking about.’
She gave him a pointed stare. ‘Well, I can remember. The thing was that Harold and I made this plan, you see, that we were going to hire a narrowboat ourselves for a few weeks, and follow the same route that this man Rolt and his wife had taken. We were going to do it in 1989, exactly fifty years after they’d set off. The idea was that we’d visit all the same places and see how things had changed in the meantime. Well, that was my idea, anyway. All Harold wanted to do, I’m sure, was sit on the roof of the boat looking at the clouds and daydreaming and writing his precious poems. But for me, you see, the point about Tom Rolt’s book – and this’ (fixing Mumtaz with another stare) ‘is why I’m telling you about it – is that it’s not just a book about canals at all. It’s one of the most amazing books about England ever written. Rolt was a very interesting man – a man with very strong beliefs – and although I dare say he was a bit of a Tory in his politics he was also into green issues years before the term had been invented. And do you know what he saw – way back in 1939? He saw a country that was already quite happily allowing itself to be killed off by the power of the big corporations.’