Free Water Gypsies by Annie Murray Page B

brimming with energy, with joy, her body leaping with the life of another child? She felt Joel’s hand on her shoulder and turned to him, his arms clasping her tight. All of them were weeping. Maryann pulled away and put her arms briefly round Darius, then went and knelt in front of Darrie, Sean and little Rose, trying to draw them all to her at once.

Eight
     
    It was some time before they were calm enough to hear from Darius what had happened. They climbed out and stood in a gaggle, the crowd on the bank tactfully retreating.
    The previous evening Darius and Nancy had gone on, getting ahead right into the dusk, aiming to get to Braunston for the night. Darkness seemed to fall even more quickly than usual and they were still on the move, persevering on through the gloom with their blacked-out headlamp. They’d get through the last few locks on the Grand Union, they agreed, tie up at Braunston and get a good start in the morning. It was already punishingly cold, ice forming on the ground, making the towpath and lock sides treacherously slippery. Nancy had been inside the Neptune, bedding the children down, and Ernie was at the tiller. At the bridge-hole before the locks, though, Nancy had completed her chores and picked up the windlass.
    ‘I’ll go out for a bit. I could do with stretching my legs,’ she said to Ernie. ‘You stay here.’
    Before he could argue she’d stepped off. Darius hadn’t known that she’d got off instead of Ernie until he looked back, wondering why Ernie hadn’t already passed the motor boat, running ahead to make sure the lock was ready. Instead, he saw Nancy puffing and panting along.
    ‘I was a bit put out with her,’ Darius said. ‘We was trying to get on and she couldn’t move as fast as she can – could – normal like, her being so big. I thought, what did Nance want to go getting off for? But it were too late by then.
    ‘We got through two and Nance was managing all right, she were strong, you know. And nippy, even when she was expecting … We was breasted up and Nance’d shut the gates behind us.’ He shook his head, still disbelieving of what had happened. ‘She’d gone and got the first paddle up. I dunno how she came to fall. She knew she always had to hold on. It was second nature. She was crossing the gate to get the other one and … I wasn’t even looking. I’d gone into the cabin for summat. She come off the gates, fell right down.’ His distress mounted as he talked. ‘I don’t know if she hit her head on the gate or on the Isla … But I looked up – the water was only coming in from one side so it was pushing us about and I thought why ent she got the other paddle open? And she weren’t there.’ His face crumpled again. ‘She just weren’t there any more.’
    It was a silent, grief-stricken cortège which made its desolate way back to Sutton Stop, outside Coventry. Other boaters who called greetings, ignorant of the tragedy, were met by the frozen, unresponsive faces of people lost in their own thoughts and emotions and the one-sided ‘How d’you do’s?’ faded unanswered on the air. Darius stood straight and still at the tiller of the Isla as the boats bore the love of his life back to be buried among the people and villages they knew so well.
    For Maryann, every chug of the engine seemed to hammer home the pain inside her. Even here, at the heart of her family, she felt very alone without Nancy. Nance had been her oldest friend, and each had linked the other with the past, with their childhood. Now Nance was gone. It was so difficult to believe and hard not to wait expectantly for Nance to pop up through the Neptune’s hatches in her bright clothes and shine the brass bands on her chimney with her usual vigour, or wave and make daft faces at them as they followed behind. All the times she would not see Nance now, all the chats and shared chores and confidences poured into her mind, bombarding her with a future of sad loneliness.
    She had