Then something else occurred to me. That was our parents’ room.
It couldn’t be them, could it? After all, they had two children already. Perhaps the madness of the night was causing the natural order of things to be upturned. And as gruesome as the sound was, it was reassuring too. It indicated a sense of stability.
I never heard it again. But I did get a Scalextric for Christmas.
Why our father thought it was a good idea to take the family on a boating holiday on the River Thames is one of those mysteries destined to remain unsolved. I invited Will Lee, who couldn’t swim. Tom brought along a French exchange student, a blond boy with a brightly coloured rucksack called Dominic, who thought he was coming to London to see Madame Tussauds. Our mother was entering into her feminist phase, which had previously been confined to buying ready meals and denigrating Nev but which was to reach a whole new level before the holiday was over.
With the benefit of hindsight, Nev should have done what had worked for holidays past: go to the travel agent on the high street, find a Mediterranean package deal, and lie on a beach for a week in ill-fitting swimming trunks while Tom was chained to the hotel room with a bout of diarrhoea and an Aldous Huxley novel, I went snorkelling and got stung by jellyfish, and Mum sat by the pool with a Danielle Steel, a glass of wine and a packet of Player’s No. 6. That way everyone got to do what he or she enjoyed. Instead, Nev set in motion a chain of events that culminated in near death, nervous breakdown, divorce and a devotion to meditation, spiritual study, communal living and the attainment of world peace through soul consciousness that continues to this day.
Before the holiday actually began it did sound quite pleasant. Judging by the photographs of joyous families in the pages of the riverboat hire brochure, it would be a summery adventure in the English countryside that involved drifting down the Thames, waving cheerily to the anglers on the banks and jumping off the side for a swim as the sun sank into the rippling water while Will Lee watched from the deck. Dominic came over a day earlier from the suburbs of Paris armed with a guide to London, a pair of Ray-Bans and a shaky grip of the English language. Will Lee’s mother Penny had, with the kind of everlasting hope only a mother can have, packed her son’s swimming trunks and inflatable water wings.
Our boat, the Kingston Cavalier III, looked impressive when we reached the boatyard: strong and proud against the weeping willows along the bank of the Thames. A large white motorboat with three levels, it had two tiny bedrooms, one with two berths and one with four, a flat roof and an outdoor deck at the back. Dominic went into the boat, came out again, and burst into tears. Tom pointed at the top bunk, said, ‘That’s mine,’ and hurled himself up onto it with a paperback of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian and a yawn.
While Will Lee and I loaded on the suitcases and a large hamper filled with fun-size Mars Bars, cocktail sausages and bottles of wine, Mum changed into her nautical outfit of white three-quarter-length trousers, espadrilles with heels, black-and-white T-shirt and a white captain’s hat. Nev spent an hour with the manager of the boat hire company, going through the boat’s workings, the laws of the river, and what to do when you needed to moor, anchor and guide the boat through a lock, nodding intently throughout. We were each in our own way prepared.
It started off well. Nev steered the Kingston Cavalier III out of the boatyard with calm, Nev-like diligence. When Tom told Dominic that we were heading in the direction of London he perked up, said, ‘Madame Tussauds, c’est la?’ and pointed down the river. Tom gave him a thumbs-up and went back to Russell. At first, Mum seemed content to sit in a folding chair on the deck with a glass of wine and a copy of Patriarchal Attitudes by Eva Figes, and make less than generous comments about the size of the bottoms of the women who hailed us from boats going in the other direction. Will and I climbed onto the roof and stayed there. The lapping lulls of the water and the singing of the birds, even the unchanging hum of the engine, were as restful and as reassuring as the sight of an old friend or a cup of hot chocolate before bedtime. Sunlight streaked through the willows and bathed the river in a golden glow. Cows in the fields beyond the banks bowed their gentle heads to the ground. Crickets chirped. The warmth of the sun soaked the land and brewed a woozy kind of contentment.
Then it began.
‘I hope you don’t think for a minute that you’re the captain of this ship just because you’re a man,’ Mum squawked, like a peacock whose tail had been yanked. ‘I can do a much better job than you. I can play tennis better than you, I can earn more money than you, and I can damn well steer a boat down the river better than you. I’m no longer going to be the woman you wish me to be, or fear me to be.’ Her captain’s hat wiggled with indignant satisfaction at that particular line.
Nev pushed up the bridge of his glasses. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘You’ve had your turn. Now it’s mine.’ Whether she was talking about driving the boat or life in general she didn’t specify, but as we were going along a wide, quiet stretch of the river with no lock, island or pleasure cruiser in the way, Nev gave a light smile and said, ‘Of course you can drive the boat, although I can hardly see how you’ll be able to do a better job than me. Do you want me to explain the basics to you?’
‘Stop patronizing me, you male chauvinist pig,’ she said, jerking him out of the way by the scruff of his v-necked tank top and grabbing the wheel.
Mum cranked the boat up a gear and sped off down the river. This caused the wind to catch her hat and for it to fly off her head. It only fell down onto the deck below, where Dominic was listening to ‘Ça Plane Pour Moi’ on a Sony Walkman, but Mum twisted round to see where it went – and forgot to take her hands off the wheel. The boat swerved violently towards port, or, as she kept insisting on calling it, starboard.
‘What are you doing?’ yelped Nev, who had made the elemental mistake of trusting Mum enough to steer the ship while he went to the toilet. He leapt up the narrow steps, but it was too late. She launched the boat straight towards the bank.
‘Stop panicking,’ she shouted, in a panicked voice. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
What nobody had explained to Mum was that going near the bank on a river doesn’t just run the danger of hitting it with the side of the boat; you can also run aground. Her deep hatred of mud, water and nature in general meant she had never explored rivers, and didn’t realize that they start off shallow and get deeper in the middle. The boat slowed down, made an angry grunt, and came to a halt.
‘What’s going on?’ she said, hair billowing about in the wind. ‘There seems to be something wrong with this vessel. Did you get ripped off again?’
‘We’ve run aground.’
‘Don’t be stupid. The boat is still in the water. We’re surrounded by the bloody stuff.’
‘The bottom of the boat is stuck in the mud.’
‘Mud! I’ll soon get us out of it,’ she said, slapping her hands together as if preparing to defeat an old foe. Dominic handed her back the captain’s hat. She adjusted it to a jaunty angle, and then she turned the engine on. Before Nev could stop her she did the one thing you mustn’t do if you run aground: rev up and attempt to move forward. This only serves to push the boat deeper into the riverbed.
‘Stop it!’ Nev shouted over the roar, trying to wrestle her away from the wheel. ‘Turn the bloody engine off.’
‘All right, keep your hair on,’ she said, bumping him out of the way. Then she did the second thing you mustn’t do: put the boat into reverse. The mud sucked up into the propellers. Nev switched