Chaplin & Company

by Mave Fellowes

  Soon the young men Walt employed were all gone away, and there wasn’t a demand for new boats to be built. So he himself would steer the boat between its two destinations. If the job was to London he’d try and get within reach of it the night before, so he could be in and out quick the next day. He didn’t much like the place. Too many people, he thought. Made everyone a stranger.

  The journeys took longer now because you couldn’t move at night, no headlamps allowed after dark because of the bombings. He didn’t mind being away for longer, liked the quiet nights spent on the water. In his boat. He’d use the engine room at the back as a cabin for overnight stops. It was cramped but he built a fold-down bunk over the motor and changed the glass in the porthole so that it could be open without the rain coming in when the engine smell was strong. He’d moor with his little cabin facing into the canal so that any moonlight hitting the water could come through the porthole and dance on the glass bowl of the compass as he lay on his bunk, looking up. He loved the weight of the windlass hooked over his belt, would lie with his hand resting on it like the hilt of a sword, run his thumb over the grooves of the date. He listened to the night sounds of the boat on the canal, the gentle washing of water at her sides and the creak of floor planks as she tilted in the breeze. Sometimes he heard a sound he couldn’t place – a sigh that seemed to come from the boat as a whole rather than any particular part. Even though he had put every inch of her together himself he couldn’t pick out exactly what it was. It sounded as if she was exhaling, letting herself sink lower into the water. He felt it as her release, her change of pitch, her shoulders dropping after their day’s work. Lying and listening to her sounds in the darkness, he felt more at home than he ever had in his own bed.

  Walt had heard of crews of steerers who navigated the canals in the blackout, taking urgent coal, food and weapons into London. Floating invisibly beneath the noses of the German planes which had begun to cross the British coastline after dark. Sometimes, moored overnight, he thought he heard these crews passing his boat, just the very faintest chug of an engine and wet turnover of water. Other steerers on the Grand Union route said they were mostly ladies who crewed the night boats.

  More evacuations were announced on the radio that spring, and he and his wife applied. Her idea. They were assigned a boy, thirteen years old, from North London they were told. They went together to Warwick Station and waited on the platform. Walt could hardly look at his wife’s face, the tightness of it. Her hands tugged at her skirt. They were rubbed red and the nails bitten down. The train pulled in. A gang of children poured out through the doors and crowded together, not knowing where to go. The woman from the evacuation office came forward with a list. Walt and Ann strained to listen. The boy didn’t step forward when his name was called and so was the last one standing on the platform after the others went, with a gas mask, a drawstring bag for a suitcase and the label ripped off the top button of his blazer. He held on tightly to the bag and mask as they led him away from the station.

  The spare room had been set up once for a baby. There was a rocking chair and a cot in the corner. But the boy didn’t seem to notice. When they went to check, that first night, he was just sitting on the bed looking out the window at the boathouse. When Walt’s wife asked if the room was all right, he wouldn’t answer or catch her eye. But he followed Walt over to the boathouse when Walt asked if he’d like to take a look. And watched quietly as Walt prepared the boat for the next morning’s run. He followed Walt back into the kitchen when his wife called over to say it was tea. All three of them sitting at the table felt new, proper. And the boy ate all right. Just quiet.

  Walt did a short run the next day and then came home. The boy still hadn’t spoken and over the next few days they began to worry. When Ann came near the boy he seemed to shrink away from the surfaces of himself, away from being touched. And there was a problem with his schooling. All the evacuees were to be taught in a special class at Stoke Bruerne grammar. But the boy wouldn’t go and Ann couldn’t get him to go. When she tried, he snatched his hand back and looked at her with eyes of something worse than panic. She hadn’t meant to be rough with him.

  They had the mother’s address in St John’s Wood but got no answer when they wrote, no answer from the boy about her either. When they asked him how to find her he looked fiercely down at his knees. He reached his arms around himself and scratched, agitated. He wouldn’t take a bath or be washed and his nails grew grubby and long like claws. He slept in his clothes. Ann didn’t know what to do about it.

  His left fist was always curled tight in his pocket. One day, desperate, she forced it out and found a picture there. The boy screamed and flew at her, scratching at her arm with some terrible strength but she held it up high. It was a studio shot of the boy looking up at a wide-faced, wide-shouldered woman in a cloche hat. Dark, thick hair escaped from a bun at the nape of her neck. She had her hands on his shoulders and looked directly back at the camera with a hooded, brazen gaze. Almost feral. Ann found it too much to look at and flicked across to the boy’s face, which was creased by a fold in the photograph. His expression was lifted, illuminated.

  The boy was still screaming. He grabbed her dress and bit into a chunk of her arm and she let the picture flutter down to the floor. He ran out of the bedroom with it and she heard his boots rapping away across the yard. Ann stood stunned. It had given her a shock to see him smiling. He didn’t come back inside till after dark and began to whimper when she opened the bedroom door. So she left him. She felt a monster. The Evacuees Office said they would make contact with the mother but that as long as the boy was safe, that was the main concern.

  Walt decided to try something. He took the boy on a short trip, one that took just a day, and kept an eye on him that way. The boy seemed to be all right with him, and all right with the boats. When Walt steered he would sit quietly, or lean over the bow watching the water. He still wasn’t talking but he looked like he was thinking of somewhere else, and a little more peaceful. And at the end of the day, when they got home, the boy sat with them at the table and afterwards he took himself to the bathroom and came out cleaner.

  Walt kept taking him out on the boat. Soon when they got to a lock the boy knew what to do and would jump to the towpath with the windlass hooked over his belt and run up to open the far lock. He managed it all right, he was stronger than he looked. Walt found he didn’t mind the boy’s company; he couldn’t tell what was in his head but it was a quiet sort of company. He seemed interested in the boat and Walt was glad to show him all of it. He taught him to start the engine, how to wind the trickier lock paddles, how to mop down the cabin sides. He gave him a try on the tiller and showed him how to navigate through Blisworth tunnel by the beams of light from ventilation shafts. You had to stand straight and line up the point of the roof with the circles of lit water that appeared every ten metres out of the blackness. Walt enjoyed having someone to teach these things to. The boy had a good concentration. When Walt was talking through something the boy would fix his eyes on Walt, and then mime the way Walt did things exactly, looking up for his approval.

  And Walt saw that Ann was relieved at the change in the boy. It began that in the mornings she’d bring their lunch packs down and send them off from the mooring. Walt would look back at her as they steered away, she’d give a wave which looked almost jolly.

  Then one morning the boat was gone. Walt was about to go on a four-day run, to London and back. Too long for the boy. Ann said what would she do with him for four days and they’d spoken to the school teacher, asked her to come by, encourage him to go to school. The boy had helped load up from Stoke Bruerne depot the afternoon before; the cargo was sacks of mail and a delivery of tins for the Heinz factory at Harlesden. They had checked the fuel and the London route maps. When Walt got up before the sun that morning the boat was gone and no sign of it half a mile along the canal each way. Straight away he took his dinghy to look. He rowed back in a terrible black mood. What a time to
rob your fellow man, he thought. His boat. And all the packets on board, he felt bad about them. All the letters. He rowed back into the boatyard and heard his wife calling; she was standing at the edge of the water. Before he reached the mooring he understood that the boy was gone too, and all his things gone with him.

  Walt felt the responsibility of it and ran to the boy’s room. The cot and the rocking chair sat there as they had always done. The bed was made up as it had been before the boy arrived. Nothing else. Ann was twisting her hands; there was no answer from the evacuation office this early but the police were sending someone. He couldn’t wait for them. He woke his neighbour and borrowed a launch, took it down the water in the direction of the city. He asked everyone, stopped at all the places he’d stop when carrying cargo. Mostly people were just coming on to the water and hadn’t seen anything but near Cosgrove a pair of boaters had seen his boat coming down that stretch an hour or two before. They said the boat was going fast and had its lamp on. They hadn’t seen the steerer. At the Bletchley Crown, the landlady, Bel, had seen the boy on the boat when she’d gone out to the cellar that morning. She’d thought Walt must be down below, and wondered why he hadn’t got the boy into a jacket, something warmer than shorts and a jersey at least. She’d waved, but the boy didn’t look and the boat went straight on. Whistled by. Yes, fast, she said.

  Walt climbed back into the launch and felt his teeth chatter. He motored on as fast as he could, pushing the throttle hard. There had been more sightings; by his estimation he was an hour and a half behind the boy. He had a horrible idea that the boy was going after his mother and that he wouldn’t stop for the blackout, but carry on straight into London with the headlamp blazing.

  His petrol cut out at nine that night, and he towed the boat by its rope half a mile to Northchurch. They said there wasn’t a chance of getting more until the morning, even for extra money. So he stayed in a boaters’ inn that night, but he didn’t sleep. Switching off the light and unpinning the blackout curtain, he looked out of the window. The moon was bright enough to paint the water silver, and make everything around it crisply visible. The long grasses on the other side were slices of pale grey and shadow, he could see the planks of the fence beyond that and the rectangles of roofs in the next-door village. So much for a blackout.

  He could hear his own breathing, which came out rough and interrupted by his thoughts.

  From the right-hand side, the Birmingham direction, came the slow prow of a huge boat, and it slid into his vision. But he blinked before he believed it because he couldn’t hear a thing. The shape in black was a wide windowless barge and the moonlight made a seam of white along the roof. The chimney puffed smoke but it dissolved into the night the moment it came out. Not a sound. It glided on. And he saw a standing figure at the back, upright and still with a hand on the tiller. The figure looked forward. The face was in shadow but the silhouette showed a cap and an oilskin with the collar up, gleaming. There was movement at the front of the boat and a shape rose up from the lumpy shadows on the foredeck. It stuck a head over the roof and spoke in a hushed voice, a woman’s voice. ‘Berkhamsted, half a mile.’ The figure at the back gave a nod and the prow pushed out of his vision and the rest disappeared after it, leaving an empty pool. It had hardly troubled the water. Two black stripes in the silvery surface.

  Before dawn he walked down to the next boatyard, towing the launch. He waited on the step until the first worker arrived. They had no faster boat to spare. So he bought fuel and set off, in his head calculating the hours lost, the distance the boy might have covered. And hoping with every lock he came to that the boy might have stopped, or have been stopped, that he would find him on the other side.

  As the day came it got lighter but no warmer. The sky was clear with a watery brightness that gave out no heat. He went for a long time without seeing another boat or another human being. The trees at the waterside were thick and the sound of bird calls rose and became almost a din. There was something unwelcoming about the water, the surface was untouched and the going felt heavy, as if it was resisting. He leaned forward and willed the boat on.

  Coming through Uxbridge at just after ten that morning, it looked changed. Even from the last time he’d come through, a month ago. Reduced. The houses set well back from the towpath. He could see dents in their outline, gaps through to rows of houses he’d not seen before. As London became louder and closer he heard sirens overlapping each other, differently pitched. Some sounded desperate, others in the distance just a hummed note. And activity on the water. By Cowley a baggy canvas hose was being run down the towpath from an industrial barge, there was smoke and shouting coming from behind the other side of a corrugated warehouse. When he looked ahead at the skyline, towers of smoke.

  At Bull’s Bridge he forked left up the Paddington arm and just beyond the Hayes lock he noticed that the water level was going down. Wet black moss was showing on the concrete banks of the canal. Quarter of a mile on and he could see the low ledge at the side. That was usually covered by a foot of water, at least. There was a boat coming the other way, an ancient battered barge, steered by a thick-set woman wrapped in a rug. As their prows drew closer he opened his mouth to ask, but something in her expression stopped him. An old, deeply lined face. She twisted her head slowly from left to right. His stomach dropped with dread and he went on, gripping the throttle, pulling it back to slow as he came around the corner.

  The first thing he saw was a boat, blown on to its side against the grassy left bank of the canal. His boat. The headlamp was on and shining weakly forward. The portholes were glassless, a line of black Os staring up at the sky. The sun caught the wet shine of the boat’s bared hull, which, he saw, needed re-tarring. There were bald patches along the bottom. The brass-handled tiller stuck up awkwardly from the back. As he looked the boat creaked and the hull dropped lower until the boat tilted to upright, the portholes leaning up to face him, eyeless.

  Walt looked at the wall of the canal, the water now visibly climbing down its surface. He turned to the opposite bank and what he saw made him yank the throttle back, cutting the engine. There was a screaming hole, a giant bite taken out of the concrete. The water was rushing into this, pouring through to a crater beyond it which was edged with brick and rubble and black soil. It was as if a handful of ground had been pulled into the earth. Sucked in. The water was filling it as fast as an open lock. On the towpath beyond the crater were objects that Walt could not at first make sense of: a clothes press, flipped back on itself, standing upright like a billboard; a mop with its string head flung over a crack in the path; a tin bucket with its mouth stupidly gaping at the water. He forced his eyes beyond these things. He was looking into a kitchen, stove and shelves and yellow-papered walls with pans hanging down on hooks. It was like the doll’s house Ann had once wanted for the baby’s room, with hinged walls that could open to show the rooms inside. He saw the underside of a staircase. A landing with a charred banister. Two floors up the browned underside of a bath stuck down through the ceiling. The houses on either side stood still and untouched and there was no one.

  He oared over to his boat and clambered desperately on, pulling open the engine room door. His bunk was down and the boy’s drawstring bag was underneath in a pool of water. The gas mask looked up at him. There was shattered glass on the floor from the porthole but, above, the thick glass bowl of the compass was still intact. The needle quivered inside it. He pushed through to the main cabin and ripped up the tarpaulins he had packed around the cargo. The crates of tins were mashed against one edge, sodden brown envelopes leaked out of the sacks of mail. He burrowed madly through these things, thinking the boy was underneath, had been trapped there. Waterlogged crates collapsed in his hands and tins tumbled out. He grabbed them and threw them over the side. He scoured along the side of the cabin and back. He pushed his hands through his hair and over his face. He pulled up the tarpaulin completely. Nothing, and nothing when he climbed up on to the deck. Just an empty grass ba
nk and that terrible scene on the other side. He looked up, to shout something. The sky was still milky and unmoving, a shut door. It would give him nothing.

  There was a groan as the boat shifted on to a tilt. Walt was pitched backwards against the cabin door. He looked down; the water was low enough now to expose the muddy level of flotsam in the bottom of the canal. Wheel spokes and glass bottles distinguished themselves, other objects had merged their slimy curves and jutting corners into one inseparable brown mass. He wanted to look away. It sat at the bottom of his stomach as a sort of shame. It was what he was. What others were.

  The launch was grounded between his boat and the bank and so he climbed shakily over it on to the grass. He walked along the fence not looking back. He had a sensation like his ears were ringing. A panic, although it wasn’t making him move faster; he felt like he was moving through a thicker element than before.

  He knocked on doors and asked. The boy? He described the scene at the canal and people knew about it. The young woman had been killed by the blast, he was told. A seamstress, her husband in the navy. Walt was told her name, and it would be impossible to forget. June Levison. He kept on asking about the boy. He kept on walking, in through the outskirts of the city, kept on knocking. Houses were empty, sometimes half a street would be rubble. Often people opened their doors quickly, with anxious faces. It made him think about the letters. June Levison. No boy.

  He spent that night in Shepherd’s Bush Underground, on a platform with many other bundles that were people. Groups bunched together, a drunk tried to sing a lullaby to a crying child, boys hung their legs over the platform edge and smoked. He made himself check each face and met blankness, met exhaustion. He was frightened underground and felt ashamed to be. He tried to sleep in the same crooked position as he would in his engine room bunk. It took him hours and then he woke up, hopeless, the last one there. For a few seconds, looking over the edge of the platform into the dark pit where the tracks were, he thought he was looking into an empty canal. June Levison.