Free Reading Madame Bovary by Amanda Lohrey

Town and moved into Tom’s flat, half of a bare-fronted, red-brick terrace in the East End, a block away from where he taught maths at the local high school. The school was a grim place, more like a gaol, with high wire fences, asphalt yards and bricks the colour of soot. The buildings even had wire mesh along the upper-storey walkways that made them look like cages. Sometimes on her morning walk to the tube station she would glance across at the school and thank God she didn’t have to work there.
    One night Tom came home and told her that soon he would be going away. Every year the school had an Easter holiday programme for some of the most deprived and disturbed kids and he had volunteered to go along. At first she was piqued at this. Easter was her birthday, which meant he wouldn’t be there to celebrate it, and when she told him he apologised solemnly and said he was very sorry but it was too late: he had volunteered before they met and he couldn’t let the others down now. He and two other teachers, husband and wife, were to take some of the worst cases from Tom’s year (they were mostly twelve, though some were thirteen) on a ten-day trip along the old industrial canals of the English midlands. The husband and wife had been before and knew the ropes and they would be in charge of one boat and Tom would command the other. An unspoken invitation hovered in the air.
    She ignored it. For one thing she had no experience with kids, she didn’t even like them. Shut up on a barge with a mob of rampaging feral children didn’t sound like a holiday to her, more like Lord of the Flies on water.
    Then, just two weeks before they were due to embark, the married couple had a death in the family and dropped out. One of the boats would have to be cancelled but it was still possible for Tom to take a party of children on the other, though it would be unwise for him to go alone. He asked Kirsten if she would come with him, and in a moment of post-coital weakness she said yes – and almost instantly began to have misgivings.
    But Tom was affectingly grateful, saying over and over again that it would be fine, it would be fine. It would be great, in fact. She’d see a bit of the English countryside and it might even be, well, you know, idyllic: punting along the glassy waterways in the mellow afternoon light, rolling green hills in the distance, trim hedges on either side, picturesque locks left over from the industrial revolution. And as for the boats themselves, she really must see them, they were marvellously decorated, all painted up in bright colours with romantic landscapes on the sides and elaborate scrollwork along the transom. ‘Like gypsy caravans,’ he said. ‘A lost art.’ He made it sound romantic.
    Undaunted by lack of experience (he had, after all, been on a canal holiday as a child), Tom borrowed a stack of books from the municipal library. Every night he pored over maps of old canal routes (the locals referred to a canal as ‘the cut’) and studied diagrams of the many different types of lock and their iron workings until he could sketch the most common of them without reference to the originals. Sometimes he would read aloud to her. ‘A lock is an assemblage, a kit of parts, and no two locks are ever alike.’ Then he would look up with one of his deadpan stares. ‘Are you listening?’ he would ask.
    â€˜I’m enthralled,’ she’d reply.
    â€˜A typical old-style lock is a rectangular chamber of brick or stone, finished with flat stone copings. The heavy gates are balanced by wooden beams which also act as levers. Each gate is anchored by a collar and turned on a cast-iron pin in a pot. The whole thing is held in place by water pressure with hand-worked paddle gear mounted on a gate or on a stand set in the ground nearby. Sometimes the gates are of steel and occasionally cast iron. They are usually black with beam ends picked out in