They caught up with Tyler in Auxerre; or rather she caught up with them, since the Dragonfly skimmed along the Yonne as quickly as her namesake. Scenting shops behind the city’s exquisite mediaeval facade, Delphine announced that she absolutely must have new clothes as she had worn everything she owned and Colin pointed out that there wasn’t a millimetre of space left on the boat and as the two of them staked out their negotiating positions, the scarlet prow of Sabrina Fair came gliding towards the quay.
“OK, I’ll admit that you could do with some shorts.”
“Shorts?” Delphine couldn’t believe her ears. “Colin, I am in rags and you are talking to me of shorts.”
“It’s Tyler!” he called to distract her. “Let’s go and help with the ropes…”
She wasn’t going to be diverted that easily. As he went hurrying towards the space where Tyler was manoeuvring (with impressive skill, he noted) Delphine cantered along beside him, “If we are going south until the butter melts, then I am definitely going to need a dress for the sun – with shoulder straps, not like this – in this I will boil–”
“One pair of shorts and that’s my final offer,” he lunged for the line which Tyler flung in his direction.
“It is not possible…” she wailed.
“Here, tie this off while I grab the other rope.”
She tied and he grabbed and Tyler lowered her gangplank.
“Wait a minute…” Colin went dashing back to the Dragonfly to retrieve the electric ring that she had lent them. “Thanks so much for this. It was a lifesaver – really, it was.”
“Cool.”
She was standing with the light behind her and staring into the sun he couldn’t clearly see her face, although from the easy tilt of her head he sensed that she was smiling.
“So are you going to give it back to me?”
“Oh yes – yes, of course.” Collecting himself, he leaned up and passed it to her. “I’m sorry; I thought we might have bumped into you sooner. I didn’t mean to hang on to it for so long. I hope you haven’t needed it.”
“I stayed over in Sens. I wanted to do an interior of the cathedral.”
“Yes,” he glanced over at Delphine. She was throwing gravel into the river, sowing gritty patterns over the surface. “We didn’t quite make it as far as the cathedral.”
“It’s horses for courses, I guess.”
“I guess,” he echoed.
He could have left then. He could have said something about needing to buy Delphine some shorts, although God knows he didn’t fancy trailing round the shops in the heat, but he didn’t. Instead, he shoved his hands into his pockets. “The cathedral here looks pretty special too, now you come to mention it…” He shaded his eyes and gazed across at the imperious outline which dominated the far bank, its pale buttresses casting themselves upwards in the name of God’s good grace.
“There’s the abbey as well…” Tyler nodded in the other direction where, like a matching bookend, the abbey sheltered from the sunshine under its terracotta roof. “Spoilt for choice,” she gave a gleeful shrug, “I’ll need to stay here for days.”
“We’re not in any hurry either, as it happens…” he answered, as if the thought had just occurred to him. He stared upstream in the direction of their notional departure. When she didn’t answer, he found himself filling the silence, “That’s the beauty of it – the freedom. Being able to go with whatever takes your–” he cleared his throat, “With whatever interests you…”
“The open river, instead of the open road.”
“Yeah – the open…” he found that he didn’t know how to finish, or possibly where to start. He glanced at his granddaughter. She was evidently bored with filling the Yonne with gravel.
“I need to get this child a pair of shorts…” he excused himself. Delphine shot him a look suggestive of deferred retribution. “Child!” she protested in a whisper which warned and don’t get me started on the shorts.
“The town’s beautiful – real beautiful,” Tyler said in a flurry as he was turning to go. “Well worth a look round.”
He hesitated, peering up at her. Her smile switched on and off like faulty neon. She had a now you see it/now you don’t kind of shyness.
“It does get a good write-up in the book,” he answered circumspectly, aware of his own instinct for caution. Because of Delphine, he told himself. “Do you know it, then?”
“I’ve been here a couple of times. On my travels…” Casually, she stretched up and began tugging at the dead heads of flowers in a window box on the wheelhouse roof, dropping them one by one over the side into the river. Colin watched the dying petals saturate and slowly retreat downstream. He looked sideways at her and could see the weather in her face, her skin faintly scored by sun and wind and rain.
Delphine tugged at his hand and then with a quick twist of irritation, she made as if to load him onto her back and carry him away with her, nearly flooring the two of them in the process.
“It’s a great place to buy shorts, that’s for sure,” she observed as he staggered and then recovered himself.
“Col–in!” urged his granddaughter, her eyes pinned wide with terrifying messages.
“Youguysfancymeetingupthisevening?” asked Tyler with such rapidity that neither of them could be sure what she had said and she had to repeat it, making her sunburn blush.
“This evening? Well, that sounds…” He deliberately avoided Delphine’s eye. “It must be our turn. Why don’t you–? What about – supper? And perhaps a drink first? With us?”
All three of them turned to contemplate the Dragonfly, which bobbed like a bath toy beside the gin palaces and barges moored along the quay.
“Do you have enough…?”
“Space?” supplied Colin, “Plenty. Well, just about. We’ll manage.”
“If you guys are sure…” Tyler addressed her equivocation to Delphine, who appeared to be blowing imaginary smoke rings into the air. The child glanced speculatively at her over the end of her invisible cigarette, then looked away.
“We’ll do a barbecue,” he said brightly, pleased with the idea.
“Now can we go into town?” implored Delphine and started pulling him away.
~~~
The barbecue and the Primus stove were perched on dry land and Colin, Tyler and Delphine were bunched up together on the Dragonfly with their knees crammed under the cabin door table. Tyler had brought a vast salad with several different types of lettuce, endive, artichoke hearts, roasted peppers, ribbons of carrot, crumbled goat’s cheese, pine nuts and torn basil all slathered in a home-made herb mayonnaise – I’m not much of a cook – which took up most of the available space.
“I really like that dress you have on, it’s so cute. Did you tie those straps yourself, or are they stitched that way?”
“They’re stitched, I think,” Delphine squinted down at her sundress.
“It’s a great effect. That shade of… what is it, fuchsia…? really is your colour.”
Importantly, as one who has no time for idle chatter, Delphine stretched right across Tyler and turned the chicken legs over on the barbecue, just as her grandfather had shown her. She then put the tongs down in the dirt on the quay as an added touch, on her own account. Colin said nothing. He was struggling to peel the potatoes by the flimsy light of a solar lamp dangling from the flagpole. From time to time a lick of wind blew the red ensign over it, causing a tiny power cut.
On the other side of the river the avenue of trees lining the bank was spangled with fairy lights. They could hear the murmur of conversation coming from a hotel boat moored close to the footbridge, the attacking sound of cutlery on china plates. The kitchen faced outwards and they could see the white shadows of the chefs moving in greasy intimacy, in a space that was almost as small as their own.
“Blast!” Colin dropped the knife and held his thumb up to the lamp; a rind of skin was hanging loose. “It’s nothing,” he tried not to look at the small punctuations of blood that were already rising to the surface of the wound. “I’m so cack-handed.”
“Let me see, let me see,” Delphine yanked his hand towards her, “Yuck – that is dégôutant.”
“It’s nothing, really,” he said whitely, thankful he was sitting down. He was about to dunk his hand over the side into the river,
“DON’T do that,” cried Tyler, “Have you had your tetanus?”
He pulled a face.
“Hold your hand above your head,” she gestured with her own hand, as if to show him how.
A trickle of blood wound round his thumb and onto his palm, following his lifeline, or the line of his heart, or the other one, he couldn’t remember what it was called. He looked away woozily.
“I’m not very good with blood…”
“That’s OK – blood is my forte. I’m fantastic with it. I really come into my own when there’s blood around. Have you got a first aid kit?”
“It’s in the everything locker. We’re sitting on it.”
They had to take the table down in order for them all to stand up, which involved putting the huge bowl of salad on the quay.
“Keep your hand above your head,” Tyler ordered. “I didn’t know you were a fisherman,” she said, slinging the tackle onto the ground next to the growing pile of barbecue, stove and salad until she found the first aid kit.
“I’m just an amateur, Delphine is the professional.”
While she swabbed the cut he made Delphine tell her about the three-star catfish, the double figure warrior.
“Wow – is that so?” Tyler applied sticking plaster to his thumb, smoothing the ends down. “There. I think you’ll live.”
“The chicken!” yelped Delphine, clambering over her grandfather and reaching for the tongs. The leg she inspected was charred and blackened and sprinkled with ash.
“Guess we’d better hurry along with those potatoes,” drawled Tyler. “Though we sure could do with more light…”
They all stood up again, precariously close to one another, while Colin hunted for candles in the everything locker until he remembered that he kept them on the shelf above his bed.
“There!” Lined up along the quay, the tiny flames glimmered, tremulous in the night air.
“Why don’t you let me–” with her complicated smile, Tyler took over the cooking of the potatoes.
“I was going to do mash,” he explained, wondering if she would notice that the spuds were getting a bit wrinkled and rooty, much like him, much like him.
As she swung into action, organising Delphine to cook some sausages to eke out the burnt chicken, he leaned back into the shadowy limits of the light from the candles and watched her. Even at the maximum possible distance, they were so close that the cuff of her shorts skimmed his leg as she moved; she smelt of sunshine overlaid with soap and he found himself wanting to press his nose against her skin as if she were a flower, and inhale. He felt a pricking of emotion at the prospect, pensive at the thought of all the years now fled, when he could have had a new life instead of grieving for the old one he had lost. Not that he hadn’t tried to make a fresh start, or at least gone through the motions: there’d been a woman called Ruth he met through work who liked photography and country walks and doubtless had a good sense of humour, but the gap between who she actually was and who he wanted her to be yawned wide and he suspected that the same had been true for her as well. In a moment of absurd optimism, he’d even joined a dating agency. He groaned aloud at the thought. Looking back, he’d let circumstances get the better of him, and then blamed his failure upon Sally. Well, it was too late now.
“Cheer up – it may never happen!” Tyler was pounding the potatoes into submission.
Quite.
He stole another glance at her. She wiped her forehead on her wrist, on the inside where the veins cast blue shadows on her skin. It was warm still, even in the darkness. Perhaps she was conscious of his eyes upon her, because for a moment her mouth looked as if it might waver into a smile – that ambiguous flare he’d noticed before – but she banged the fork on the side of the pan as if she’d thought better of it, and he wondered if this was intended as a rebuke, as if he’d gone too far, although he hadn’t moved at all, hadn’t done anything to suggest – Never mind my second childhood, I’m having my second adolescence here. In his confusion he turned to say something to Delphine, anything, when Tyler announced with a flourish, “Dinner is served.”
They all stood up so that he could retrieve the crockery and cutlery from the kitchen locker and as he set forks and plates on the cabin door table, he felt obscurely irritated with himself.
“Why France?” he asked. He could have sworn he heard his granddaughter say on a breath Why France? and was tempted to kick her under the table.
He steeled himself, “Salad?” and handed her the enormous bowl.
Salad? came the faintest whisper.
“Distance, mainly. I wanted to put distance between myself and – just about everything, to tell you the truth. Distance and the Impressionists…”
“I saw a fantastic exhibition of Van Gogh in London…”
I saw a fantastic exhibition…
He turned round and stared hard at his granddaughter for several seconds; there was a derisory edge to the innocent expression on her face.
“And the wine, of course,” said Tyler a little tensely.
“And the scenery,” added Colin.
“These chicken legs are just great. You are the neatest cook,” she said to Delphine.
At this, Delphine slowly unfurled herself; it was as if she came into bloom and Colin later remembered her sitting upright and smiling with gratification or maybe, in retrospect, with malice.
“Would you pass me the potato?” she asked sweetly. She took the pan he handed to her and sniffed at it, and sniffed at it again. “Does it smell strange to you, grand-père?”
She never called him grand-père; he should have been alerted. He took the pan back and sniffed it, shaking his head.
“It smells fine to me.”
Wide-eyed, Delphine turned to Tyler, “What do you think? It smells a little… Je ne sais quoi?”
Tyler shrugged. “I didn’t put anything out of the ordinary in it,” but to oblige the child she leaned forward to sniff and as she did so, Delphine rammed the whole pan of mash right into her face.