Houseboat on the Seine (1987) by William Wharton

Author:William Wharton
Format: epub
Published: 1987-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

Eleven

Family Arrangements

In the morning, Sunday, that is, I invite the rest of the family to see how our boat is coming along. They are properly impressed. If they weren’t, I’d have divorced the whole kit and caboodle of them. The gangplank is a great success. I show off some of the furniture and rugs I’ve been buying. Rosemary likes the things I chose.

Now we start figuring out where everyone is going to sleep. At first, Matt wants to sleep in the crew cabin, but to go down in there, he’d need to come out from the house part of the boat, walk across the deck and climb down the ladder through the hatch. Matt doesn’t especially look forward to that, particularly with winter coming on.

One of the things I found at Abbe Pierre’s is a three-quarter bed with a good mattress and drawers for storage under it. The wood is oak and the handles on the drawers are brass. I don’t know how it wound up there at Abbi Pierre’s but it’s perfect for our boat. The question is whether Rosemary and I will sleep on that bed in the living room, in front of the first large-view window. If so, the girls would sleep in the back bedroom. An alternative is that we sleep back there, with the girls in this new bed and Matt roughing it out in the crew cabin. There’s also a small entry into which we could put a tiny bed, big enough for Camille. She’s the youngest and the shortest. The bed can’t be more than five feet long, but it tucks nicely into a corner there above where the steps go down into the lower boat.

We figure we’ll work it out. In fact, we do right there. We decide Kate will sleep on the bed in the living room, the new one. Rosemary and I will be in the back bedroom, and Camille will sleep in the entry. Matt will be sleeping in the crew cabin; he’s gone up and down the steps several times out there now and is comfortable with the idea. I promise I’ll bring light and heat down into the room. He’ll have space to store all his clothes, his airplanes, chemicals, animal and plant collections. Generally, storage is going to be a serious problem on the boat.

Matt tries out the bed. It was definitely built for a small French sailor, but by sleeping corner to corner, it’s big enough. Matt stretches out on it and is excited with the whole idea.

Only Kate is anxious about the boat sinking. I don’t blame her, but I’ve become convinced that with this metal hull, we’re safe. Every time some methane gas explodes, like a whale fart from under the boat, she jumps. Also, sleeping in that bed, she’d be sleeping right over where the board blew out when the upper boat sank. I try not making too much of that. I wasn’t going to tell her at all, but figured it wouldn’t be quite fair.

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