early if we’re to get off this damned sandbank.’
‘Has Captain Pringsheim stranded us, baby?’
‘It’s these charts. If only they would give an exact indication of depth.’
‘If you knew where we were, you’d probably find they do. It’s no use knowing it’s three feet–’
‘Fathoms, honey, fathoms.’
‘Three fathoms in Frogwater Reach if we’re really in Fen Broad.’
‘Well, wherever we are, you’d better start hoping there’s a tide that will rise and float us off,’ said Gaskell.
‘And if there isn’t?’
‘Then we’ll have to think of something else. Maybe someone will come along and tow us off.’
‘Oh God, G, you’re the skilfullest,’ said Sally. ‘I mean why couldn’t we have just stayed out in the middle? But no, you had to come steaming up this creek wham into a mudbank and all because of what? Ducks, goddamned ducks.’
‘Waders, baby, waders. Not just ducks.’
‘OK, so they’re waders. You want to photograph them so now we’re stuck where no one in their right minds would come in a boat. Who do you think is going to come up here? Jonathan Seagull?’
In the galley Eva made coffee. She was wearing the bright red plastic bikini Sally had lent her. It was rather too small for her so that she bulged round it uncomfortably and it was revealingly tight but at least it was better than going around naked even though Sally said nudity was being liberated and look at the Amazonian Indians. She should have brought her own things but Sally had insisted on hurrying and now all she had were the lemon loungers and the bikini. Honestly Sally was so authora…authorasomething…well, bossy then.
‘Dual-purpose plastic, baby, apronwise,’ she had said, ‘and G has this thing about plastic, haven’t you, G?’
‘Bio-degradably yes.’
‘Bio-degradably?’ asked Eva, hoping to be initiated into some new aspect of women’s liberation.
‘Plastic bottles that disintegrate instead of lying around making an ecological swamp,’ said Sally, opening a porthole and dropping an empty cigar packet over the side, ‘that’s G’s lifework. That and recyclability. Infinite recyclability.’
‘Right,’ said Gaskell. ‘We’ve got in-built obsolescence in the automotive field where it’s outmoded. So what we need now is in-built bio-degradable deliquescence in ephemera.’
Eva listened uncomprehendingly but with the feeling that she was somehow at the centre of an intellectual world far surpassing that of Henry and his friends who talked about new degree courses and their students so boringly.
‘We’ve got a compost heap at the bottom of the garden,’ she said when she finally understood what they were talking about. ‘I put the potato peelings and odds and ends on it.’
Gaskell raised his eyes to the cabin roof. Correction. Deckhead.
‘Talking of odds and ends.’ said Sally, running a fond hand over Eva’s bottom, ‘I wonder how Henry is getting along with Judy.’
Eva shuddered. The thought of Henry and the doll lying in the bath still haunted her.
‘I can’t think what had got into him.’ she said, and looked disapprovingly at Gaskell when he sniggered. ‘I mean it’s not as if he has ever been unfaithful or anything like
