Rapids by Tim Parks

opened the glove compartment of the car, found his mobile and turned it on. There were no messages. Then, driving, he called the office. It was strange. In a matter of seconds he was in touch with London, with reality. His secretary was a small Chinese woman in her fifties. Of course you’re needed, she told him, but everybody’s agreed to wait till you’re back. That would be Monday. So nothing urgent? he asked. It’ll be urgent on Monday, Mr Marshall, but not before. She asked him if he were having a good break. It was blistering in London, she said. She couldn’t remember a year like it. He told her he felt immensely refreshed.
    Vince drove past stacks of timber, sawmills. The sun was fierce. There was an open yard full of wooden weathercocks, machine—carved, life—size crucifixes, curious trolls. We come here to play on the river and have no contact with the locals, he thought. A lean old man in a broad—brimmed hat and blue overalls was scything the steep bank above the road to the right. Quite probably he had never been on the water that raced through his valley. Is it really possible I’ll be back in the City on Monday? Vince was conscious of enjoying the drive, of deliberately looking out for everything foreign and unusual: the wide wooden balconies, the gothic script over shops and hotels, the weathercocks, the hay hung on wooden trestles up steep slopes, the little children in leder—hosen, the onion domes of the churches. Did I ever belong to anything aside from the bank? he wondered. Was I part of any community outside the office? Important decisions were being taken without him. I mustn’t miss the turn to the hospital, he worried.
    They’re seeing him now, Michela looked up and smiled. The waiting room was a mix of tourists and locals, sitting round the walls, flicking through provincial newspapers, international glamour magazines, nursing wounds and coughs. Two or three men kept glancing at the tall Italian girl in her neoprene shorts and white bikini top. Only since Gloria’s death had Vince become acutely aware that he had never been with any other woman but his wife. He had never ‘picked up’ a woman. They had found themselves, he and Gloria, in adjacent rooms in Durham university dorms. It would have been hard to establish a moment when either deliberately chose the other. By a process of happy osmosis they had married. If you removed that boulder, Keith had been talking to the group yesterday about reading the river, which way do you think the water would go? How many things downstream would that effect? Suddenly Vince is in trouble again. With a determined effort, he asked the girl:
    How many of these groups will you be getting then?
    Sorry? Michela looked up from a magazine.
    Will you be having another group right after ours?
    Four altogether. We have a week’s break after this one for a demonstration in Berlin. Then one after another right through to the end of August.
    And then?
    How do you mean?
    I suppose you have some other job.
    We’ll go back to England, do courses there through the winter. In England the only real white water is in winter. Here it slows up when the glaciers stop melting. She laughed: We must look crazy dressed like this.
    Me more than you, he said. He was wearing a grey thermal top and swimming shorts. She raised an eyebrow.
    Being so much older, Vince explained.
    You’re younger than Keith.
    And you won’t miss anyone in Italy?
    No, she grimaced.
    There must be someone.
    I hate Italy.
    All the English love it.
    She turned to him. Suddenly she was wry and sophisticated. You want to know? Everybody seems to think I’m such a mystery. I’m not. Just that all the Italian I heard before I was ten was my parents arguing, hating each other and me. Understand?
    I’m sorry, Vince said.
    But the girl wouldn’t let him off the hook. And when I was in my teens it was my mother on her own telling me she didn’t want to live anymore. She regularly took overdoses. The