A Boat Called Patience

Nobody had named the boat Patience for a reason. She had been Patience when Lena and Owen bought her, painted in cream letters on the green of the bow, and the man who sold her to them said the name had been there when he bought her too, and so it had probably been there since she was built, and by now it was less a name than a fact. She was fifty-seven feet long and six feet ten inches wide, and she went, at the very most, at four miles an hour, and she was called Patience, and that was that.

On the last Sunday in September they moved her to the winter mooring.

It was three miles and two locks, which on a canal is an afternoon. They cast off at two, when the sun was still doing its best, Owen at the tiller and Lena on the roof with her legs hanging over the side, and the engine going in its steady, low, under-everything way, like a large animal breathing in its sleep.

The canal went where it went. That was the thing about it. There was no steering to speak of, just a nudge here and there to keep her off the bank. The water was brown and still and went ahead of them between the reeds and the hawthorn, and behind them their wake was a long, slow, spreading V that reached the banks a good while after they had passed, so that the reeds nodded to nobody.

“Heron,” said Lena.

There was a heron on the towpath. It watched them come, considered whether they were worth the effort, decided they were not, and stayed where it was, and they went by it close enough to see its eye.

The first lock was at the bend by the pub. Lena hopped off with the windlass and walked up ahead, and Owen brought Patience in slow, and the gates closed behind them with the deep, wet, wooden sound that lock gates make, which is one of the oldest sounds there is. Then Lena wound the paddles up and the water came in and the boat rose, an inch at a time, no faster than it wanted to, with Owen holding the rope and Lena leaning on the beam and neither of them saying much, because a lock is not a place for hurry. When the water was level the gates swung open on the new stretch, and the light was a shade lower, and they went on.

Between the locks was the long bit, the bit with nothing in it, which was the bit Lena liked best.

The towpath ran alongside. A man went past on a bicycle with a dog trotting beside him and lifted a hand. A woman walking the other way said, “Lovely evening,” and it was. There were fields on the far side, with the hay already in, and on the near side a row of back gardens that ran right down to the water, with sheds and washing lines and one small boy on a swing who watched them all the way past without blinking, as if a boat were the most serious thing he had ever seen.

Owen put the kettle on. You could do that, on a boat. You could steer with one hand and make tea with the other, if the water was straight enough and you had done it enough times, and Owen had done it enough times. He passed her cup up to the roof. She took it without looking, and their hands touched, and the boat went on at its four miles an hour, which at that moment felt exactly right, and possibly slightly fast.

The sun went behind the trees on the far bank. The water went from brown to the colour of tea with the milk not stirred in.

“Lights,” said Owen, and put the lamp on at the bow, not because they needed it yet but because it was nice to see it there, a small warm circle on the water going ahead of them like a dog that knew the way.

The second lock was in the dusk. Lena walked up to it along the towpath in the almost dark, with the windlass over her shoulder, and the gates were already open, because the last boat through had been kind, and Owen brought Patience in so slowly that the water hardly noticed. This time the boat went down, not up. The water went out under the bottom gate with a sound like a bath emptying, and the walls of the lock rose up around them, dark and green and dripping, and the sky went from a wide thing to a narrow strip above, with the first star in it. Then the gates opened and they were out, and low, and on the final stretch.

The winter mooring was at the end of a line of boats, under a willow, with a ring on the bank and a post with a number on it, and they had moored there every autumn for six years and it had not changed.

Owen brought her in. Lena stepped off with the bow rope and looped it through the ring, and he stepped off with the stern rope and did the same, and the boat came to rest against the bank with a small, final nudge, like someone leaning back in a chair.

Then he cut the engine.

The quiet came in all at once. It was the kind of quiet you only get after an engine, big and round and full of small things, the willow moving, the water ticking against the hull, a moorhen somewhere in the reeds saying the one thing it knew how to say.

They stood on the bank a minute and looked at her. The lamp still on at the bow, the cream letters on the green, the curtains not yet drawn.

“Well,” said Owen.

“Well,” said Lena.

They went inside and lit the stove. It took, the way it always took, with a bit of persuading and then all at once, and the little glass door went orange, and the boat began, slowly, to warm through from the middle out. Lena drew the curtains. Owen put the kettle on again, because that was what you did. Outside, the last of the light went off the water, and the willow went dark, and the other boats along the mooring showed their own small windows, one by one, a row of them, like a street that had decided to lie down.

They ate on their knees. They did not talk much. The stove ticked. The boat, very gently, moved, the way she always moved, a fraction this way and a fraction back, as if she were breathing too.

Later, in the bed at the bow, they could hear the water against the hull just the other side of the steel. A hand’s width away. Ticking and settling. Settling and ticking.

“Three miles,” said Lena, into the dark.

“Took us all afternoon.”

“Good.”

He put an arm over her. The stove glowed through the gap in the door. The mooring rope creaked once at the ring and was still.

And Patience lay under the willow with the water holding her, the way it had held her for as long as she had had a name, and rocked them, very slightly, all night.