Salt by Jeremy Page Page B

she’s taking good care of it. A precious cargo of rollmops, cheese and pickles. Sometimes she’ll look up to see someone cycling along the bank or crossing a bridge. She watches the cyclist pedalling into the distance, until it’s no longer clear whether his pedals are going round or whether they’re now going up, then down, up, then down. Though it’s not the sunniest of days, the summer haze eventually makes the man wobble on his bike, then disappear entirely, as if he’s fallen off the edge of the world. George’s eye is on the Ordnance Survey map and is struggling to decipher the drains and dykes, at right angles and in parallel, the rivers and the sluices. Their symmetry challenges his right to be in charge, and several times he has to scramble up the high riverbank to stand at the top, scratch his head, and privately curse the idiosyncrasies of a fenland where all the rivers actually flow above the level of the fields. It says on the map ‘below sea level’, but it feels like they’re travelling in the sky.
    He soon devises his Fenland Steering Method - it’s brought about the ingenuity in him, this boat business - where he ties up the rudder so it can’t move. They sit at the front of the boat, side by side, away from the noise and smell of the outboard, listening to the water as it passes in a soothing rhythm. And by leaning, in unison, gently - ever so gently - one way or the other, the boat begins to steer itself. And as Lil’ leans into George, he leans away, their distance always kept constant.
    After an hour, her head lolls on to his shoulder. He stares ahead, taking pride in his task, watching the minuscule shifting of the boat’s steering as her body relaxes softly against him. That’s it, Lil’, you close your eyes. He puts his arm round her and she strokes his side tenderly. He reaches further round her, putting his hand on the opposite gunwale so that the weight of his arm rebalances the boat. Men do things while women sleep - he thinks happily - to rebalance the world.
    And like somnambulist lovers, their boat takes them into a dream scene. They’re steering down the Middle Level Main Drain to a village called Three Holes. A high pale blue sky, the sleepy colour of a late English summer. Distantly, the sound of larks. The woody smell of cabbage, which must remind Lil’ of the weeks she spent at the Quaker Cottage Hospital in Emneth Hungate, not so far from this place. In my mind it all slows down in balletic movement. The humming of the engine lowers hypnotically, the water lulls them towards sleep. Ahead, the top of a small house is seen over the bank. Nothing stirs in the air, not even the soft worn collar of George’s twill shirt, or the set dome of his wife’s now fully grown beehive. She sighs, sways softly with the motion of the boat, looks up briefly when she hears the sound of a child’s giggle somewhere along the bank. He hears it too, and is perhaps the first to see the three figures ahead. He startles from his reverie, begins to fuss with the wooden handle of the rudder, feels the hand of his wife being placed on his and, for a moment, they lock eyes.
    â€˜George,’ she says. And says no more.
    The three figures on the bank are close now. A man and a woman, perhaps twenty years older than Lil’ and George, dressed in clothes too heavy for the weather. They’ve been eating boiled eggs and haslet and cherry tartlets and a bottle of cordial is propped up in the grass between them. They’re looking calmly at the boat coming towards them down the drain, but the man abruptly stands and calls out a name: Elsie! Elsie, come here, darling!
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    I imagine the colours bleaching out at this point. I imagine the sun’s glare sweeps into the channel like an arc light and I see Lil’ and George both looking ahead, their hands raised to shield their eyes. Dazzled and tight-lipped, she glimpses a halo