‘That was yesterday,’ snapped Sally. ‘Today they just mean we’re invisible to anyone more than fifty feet away. And now you’ve screwed the motor. I told you not to rev it like that.’
‘So how was I to know it would bust a con rod,’ said Gaskell. ‘I was just trying to get us off this mudbank. You just tell me how I’m supposed to do it without revving the goddam motor.’
‘You could get out and push.’
Gaskell peered over the side. ‘I could get out and drown,’ he said.
‘So the boat would be lighter,’ said Sally. ‘We’ve all got to make sacrifices and you said the tide would float us off.’
‘Well I was mistaken. That’s fresh water down there and means the tide doesn’t reach this far.’
‘Now he tells me. First we’re in Frogwater Beach…’
‘Reach,’ said Gaskell.
‘Frogwater wherever. Then we’re in Fen Broad. Now where are we for God’s sake?’
‘On a mudbank,’ said Gaskell.
In the cabin Eva bustled about. There wasn’t much space for bustling but what there was she put to good use. She made the bunks and put the bedding away in the lockers underneath and she plumped the cushions and emptied the ashtrays. She swept the floor and polished the table and wiped the windows and dusted the shelves and generally made everything as neat and tidy as it was possible to make it. And all the time her thoughts got untidier and more muddled so that by the time she was finished and every object insight was in its right place and the whole cabin properly arranged she was quite confused and in two minds about nearly everything.
The Pringsheims were ever so sophisticated and rich and intellectual and said clever things all the time but they were always quarrelling and getting at one another about something and to be honest they were quite impractical and didn’t know the first thing about hygiene. Gaskell went to the lavatory and didn’t wash his hands afterwards and goodness only knew when he had last had a shave. And look at the way they had walked out of the house in Rossiter Grove without clearing up after the party and the living-room all over cups and things. Eva had been quite shocked. She would never have left her house in that sort of mess. She had said as much to Sally but Sally had said how nonspontaneous could you get and anyway they were only renting the house for the summer and that it was typical of a male-oriented social system to expect a woman to enter a contractual relationship based upon female domestic servitude. Eva tried to follow her and was left feeling guilty because she couldn’t and because, it was evidently infra dig to be houseproud and she was.
And then there was what Henry had been doing with that doll. It was so unlike Henry to do anything like that and the more she thought about it the more unlike Henry it became. He must have been drunk but even so…without his clothes on? And where had he found the doll? She had asked Sally and had been horrified to learn that Gaskell was mad about plastic and just adored playing games with Judy and men were like that and so to the only meaningful relationships being between women because women didn’t need to prove their virility by any overt act of extrasexual violence did they? By which time Eva was lost in a maze of words she didn’t understand but which sounded important and they had had another session of Touch Therapy.
And that was another thing she was in two minds about. Touch Therapy. Sally had said she was still inhibited and being inhibited was a sign of emotional and sensational immaturity. Eva battled with her mixed feelings about the matter. On the one hand she
