Free Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald Page A

the yard of a public house on the Surrey side.
    ‘I’m attracting his attention,’ Tilda shouted. ‘He can drive us home, and we can put the pushcart on the back seat.’
    ‘Tilda, you don’t understand. He’d have to say yes, because he’s sorry for us, I heard him tell Richard we were no better than waifs of the storm, and we should ruin the upholstery, and be taking advantage of his kindness.’
    ‘It’s his own fault if he’s kind. It’s not the kind who inherit the earth, it’s the poor, the humble, and the meek.’
    ‘What do you think happens to the kind, then?’
    ‘They get kicked in the teeth.’
    Woodie drove them back across the bridge.
    ‘You’ll have to look after yourselves this winter, you know,’ he said. ‘No more lifts, I’m afraid, I shall be packed up and gone till spring. I’m thinking of laying up Rochester in dry dock. She needs a bit of attention.’
    ‘Do you have to manage all that packing by yourself?’ Tilda asked.
    ‘No, dear, my wife’s coming to give me a hand.’
    ‘You haven’t got a wife!’
    ‘You’ve never seen her, dear.’
    ‘What’s her name?’
    ‘Janet.’ Woodie began to feel on the defensive, as though he had made the name up.
    ‘What does she look like?’
    ‘She doesn’t much care for the river. She spends the summer elsewhere.’
    ‘Has she left you, then?’
    ‘Certainly not. She’s got a caravan in Wales, a very nice part, near Tenby.’ Although Woodie had given this explanation pretty often, he was surprised to have to make it to a child of six. ‘Then in the winter we go back to our house in Purley. It’s an amicable arrangement.’
    Was there not, on the whole of Battersea Reach, a couple, married or unmarried, living together in the ordinary way? Certainly, among the fairweather people on the middle Reach. They lived together and even multiplied, though the opportunity for a doctor to hurry over the gangplank with a black bag, and, in his turn, fall into the river, had been missed. Bluebird , which was rented by a group of nurses from the Waterloo Hospital, had been at the ready, and when the birth was imminent they’d seen to it that the ambulance arrived promptly. But, apart from Bluebird , the middle Reach would be empty by next week, or perhaps the one after.
    Martha, who had decided to stop thinking about the inconvenience they were causing, asked Woodie not to stop at the boats; they would like to go on to the New King’s Road.
    ‘We want to stop at the Bourgeois Gentilhomme,’ she said, with the remnants of the French accent the nuns had carefully taught her.
    ‘Isn’t that an antique shop, dear?’
    ‘Yes, we’re going to sell an antique.’
    ‘Have you got one?’
    ‘We’ve got two.’
    ‘Are you sure you’ve been to this place before?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I shall have to pull up as near as I can and let you out,’ said Woodie. He wondered if he ought to wait, but he wanted to get back to Rochester before she came afloat. He watched the two girls, who, to do them justice, thanked him very nicely, they weren’t so badly brought up when you came to think about it, approach the shop by the side door.
    On occasions, Martha’s courage failed her. The advantages her sister had in being so much younger presented themselves forcibly. She sharply told Tilda, who had planted herself in a rocking-chair put out on the pavement, that she must come into the shop and help her speak to the man. Tilda, who had never sat in a rocker before, replied that her boots were too dirty.
    ‘And anyway, I’m old Abraham Lincoln, jest sittin and thinkin.’
    ‘You’ve got to come.’
    The Bourgeois Gentilhomme was one of many enterprises in Chelsea which survived entirely by selling antiques to each other. The atmosphere, once through the little shop-door, cut down from a Victorian billiard-table, was oppressive. Clocks struck widely different hours. At a corner table, with her back turned towards them, sat a woman in black, apparently