Free Reading Madame Bovary by Amanda Lohrey Page A

white. The use of paint, tar and whitewash preserves the gates and makes them visible in grey weather or the dark.’
    â€˜Really?’ she would say. ‘How fascinating.’
    But it was the boats he had fallen in love with. These low barges were known as narrow-boats and they harked back to the 1760 s. Far from being dour they were covered in bright patterns that were positively gaudy, carnivalesque even. The highlight was always one idealised scene on the starboard side, which might be a cottage beside a pond but more likely a Bohemian castle set high above a mountain lake, some luridly crimson Shangri-La sunset flaming behind the turrets, and the whole scene encircled by an outer wreath of yellow and pink roses entwined in dark-green ivy. The overall effect was of a floating sideshow, crude but somehow enlivening, a diorama of the utopian.

    Each day Tom grew more and more enthused while she, Kirsten, began to feel a secret, queasy reluctance. It was an English spring. She had been warned that it could be cold and there was no heating on the boats. It would almost certainly be wet. She began to meditate on excuses she might give for opting out, but could think of none that she wouldn’t be ashamed to utter.
    In the end what swayed her was the photograph.
    She found it in one of the books that Tom had brought home from the library, a large picture book about barges in the nineteenth century. Right at the end was a photograph that they both found peculiarly affecting, an old sepia print, dated around 1870 , of a barge with the strange name of Gort . The boat was taken in long shot and the figure of a woman could be seen standing at the stern. In the long shot the woman was a faint image, like an apparition, but in the enlarged detail she was as solid and material, as mundane and domestic as any woman could be. This was the bargemaster’s young wife and behind her you could see the small wooden cabin that was her home and into which, astonishingly, she had crammed all her possessions. The curved wall at the back was hung with small pictures in ornate frames, while on a narrow wooden shelf to one side there was a lace doily, a teapot, a brass oil lamp and tiny porcelain ornaments. Often , said the caption, the living areas of these boats were like small shrines , and here at the centre of her dark, domesticated hollow stood the young wife, a kind of low-life industrial Madonna, her head compressed with tight ringlets, her body encased in a dress of drab grey serge that fell into a wide Victorian skirt, as wide almost as the door of the cabin. And in her arms she was holding a baby.
    This baby was wrapped in a funnel of white swaddling clothes so that only its face was visible, and in this face – was it an effect of the sepia? – only the eyes could be discerned, just a few grainy markings, a shadow here, a smudge there, but somehow the effect was uncanny. The baby looked not as if it were being held in its mother’s arms but as if it were hovering there, like a ghost.
    Kirsten had stared at this image for some time, gazing at it with a kind of horror mixed with pity. It was unbelievable that anyone could live in that dark, confined space, never mind make a home of it for a baby. Day after day, on the grey water, so flat and oily in its man-made channels; so dense with a sense of enclosure, of brick and tar and charcoal and smoke.
    But what moved her was this. In the accompanying text it said that despite growing up on the canals, hardly any of the canal children ever learned to swim. Drowned children were registered in parish records and when canal children perished the name of the boat would be entered in the parish register as the child’s home. It shocked her, the idea that anyone would keep a child on the water and not teach it how to swim. But then for most of the year the water was freezing, and according to the text it was more than likely that the child’s parents were themselves