Chapter 19 The Long Lease

The file went in on the twenty-eighth of June at ten past four in the afternoon, and it was eleven sheets and one book, and I put it in an envelope with a paperclip, and I walked down to the district office in Anderry and gave it to a woman called Brenda who has worked there for eleven years and who said, "Is this the Oyelaran one?" "That's the one." "Twenty years, isn't it." Brenda weighed it. "It's the first one anybody's put in for two years. Do you know how many people have asked me about the twenty-year thing? About thirty. And do you know how many have actually gone through with it? One, in 2023, and he was seventy-one and he sold it in 2024." She put it in a tray. "You'll hear in about six weeks. It isn't a no, before you start. If it was a no I'd tell you now, because I've got to tell you now, that's my job, and I'd want the same." The six weeks were the longest of my adult life and I am aware that is an outrageous thing to say about a woman who was married for five years. I did not stop work. I want that on the record, because I know how this story is supposed to go and it did not go that way. I went to work. I had a practice to run. I had a man at half past nine on the Tuesday and I did a crown on him that took forty minutes and it came out perfectly and he said, "That's the best that's ever been in my mouth," and I said, "It's the same tooth," and he said, "It's not the same mouth," and I have thought about that at about four in the morning roughly once a week ever since. Ruth covered me for two days in the June and did not make me explain the second one either. The second one was because I went to Derby. I went to Derby because there is a boat register and a woman behind a counter and a book with a form in it and I wanted to see, with my own eyes, a piece of paper with a man's signature on it, from the eighth of April, forty-five pounds, one pound sale. There it was. A transfer of registered ownership of a vessel. Vessel number on the front. Two columns. One column said PIKE, J. of 14 Ashcroft Fold, Anderry. The other column said HARTLEY, R. E., same address, which was the boat, and which was my address, and which he had put down because he did not ask me, because he does not ask, because his entire system is arranged and then adjacent. And at the bottom, on the line, in a hand I have known since 1994 and which has not changed since 1994 and which put B and P on a vice in June and then stopped: J. Pike. Witness: M. Oyelaran, RICS, dated the 8th April. Marguerite Oyelaran witnessed it. I stood in a room in Derby and looked at that for a while, and then I went out into the street and walked to a coffee shop and sat down and did not order anything, and worked it backwards, because I am a woman who works things backwards. Marguerite was the surveyor. Marguerite was the one who told me in March that a book written in one hand is a diary. Marguerite is the one who found the ringworm, in May, on the hard, underneath, with a torch, and who sent a disclosure to the inspectorate about a pipe that she had not been told about and would not have found for two years. Marguerite was the one who said, on the Friday in April, "I want to move the survey. I want it next week, and I want you to ring the yard and ask them to lift her out on the Friday, and I'll pay the crane and I'll split it with you." And in April, the day after a man of forty-four walked into a registry office forty miles away and sold a boat to a woman for a pound, a surveyor and an estate agent and a boat inspectorate all at once, quietly, without any of them discussing it, arranged for that boat to be lifted out of the water. I want to be extremely careful here, because I am a person who has spent two years writing true things in drawers at night and being an unreliable narrator in the morning, and this is exactly the kind of thing I would construct at four in the morning and then disbelieve at eight. Here is what I actually know. I know that Marguerite Oyelaran said that sentence to me. I know that Jonah Pike said the sentence about a shed on the water. I know that neither of them said the other's name. And here is what I also know, which is that the mooring office and the surveyor and the registry are three separate bodies of people in three separate buildings, two of them in a town forty miles away, who do not discuss individual boats with each other, and who have no mechanism by which they could, and who have never in the history of this cut arranged anything in common for anybody. So I do not think they arranged it. I think my mother arranged it, from a flat in Anderry, in August of 2019, with a solicitor, and a sentence in a will about a boat, and a phone call to a woman she had known since 1988 because they were both receptionists and had worked in the same building. I think my mother, who had a practice of her own for thirty years and who was in the position to make a phone call, made one phone call, and I think she made it to a woman who was at that point fourteen years away from being the surveyor who would lift a boat out of a canal in April. I am not going to be able to prove it and I have stopped needing to. I have decided, on the balance of a life spent being careful, that there are two things available to a woman like my mother and one of them is to leave money and one of them is to make sure a boat gets looked at, and that she did both, and that she did the second one in 2019, and that she never told me, and that she wrote *keep the use of the narrowboat Olive* and underlined it four times and asked a solicitor whether it was binding, and that she never once in her life said a plain thing to me about anything that mattered. She looked at a light on a front deck in a garden in 1994, and she looked at a boat from a kitchen window in 2019, and she said nothing about either, and she left me the practice and the flat and eleven thousand pounds worth of timber with ringworm in it. The waiting was six weeks and I am not going to describe all of it, because it was ordinary, and because ordinary is what a person does. I saw Nan every Friday. She did not ask. She made dinner and we watched something and she told me about Trevor's Christmas of 1991 in a way that was entirely one-sided, and on the third Friday she said: "You've decided." "I've submitted the file." "That's not what I asked," said Nan Hart, "and you've known that since the second Friday, and I'll tell you what you actually did, which was you decided some time in June and you've been carrying it round the shops since and you're waiting for a piece of paper to make it real so that you don't have to be the one who said it first. And I'd like to point out, as your mother, that this is what your father did, and I watched him do it for eleven years, and it cost us everything, and I am not going to watch you do it, and I would like you to telephone that man on Sunday." "Mum—" "Sunday," said Nan. "Not about the file. Not about the pipe. Not about a will or a mooring or a woman in Derby. And I don't care what you say. I have been in this room with a dead man's daughter and I know what it is when somebody is walking round something for four years." So I telephoned him on the Sunday. I got as far as the ringtone. I did not hang up. I want that on the record: I did not hang up, and there was no rain, and I was in a flat in a kitchen I have paid for myself and he was in a flat eleven miles away and I had the whole of the thing ready, I had it in a drawer and I knew it word for word, and the phone rang four times. He said, "Roz." And what I said was: "You put my address on a transfer form in April and I have just found out that the witness was the surveyor, and I have got a number of questions about that, and none of them are the question I actually came to ask, and I am going to hang up now and ring you on Wednesday." And he said, "Okay." And I said, "I'm not hanging up. I'm going to stand here for a second. I have got the thing I came to say and it is in a drawer in the next room in an envelope and I could go and get it, and I want you to know that I am not going to go and get it." "Roz—" "I'm going to say it badly," I said. "That's the deal. I say everything badly, I've been doing it since 2016, and I am not going to get it right, and you're going to have to work at it. And I'm saying it now, at about half past five on a Sunday, standing in a kitchen, and if you say anything at all for the next two minutes I will stop and I will not ring you back for a year, and I mean that, and I have thought about it and it's true. Two minutes. Go." And he said, "Go." So I said: "I have been in love with you since a Tuesday in 2016 when you were doing a caulking compound and swearing at a tube, and I did not say it, and I did not say it in 2018, and I did not say it to a solicitor, and I did not say it to Ruth, and I did not say it to my mother, and I have written it down eleven times in a drawer, and I would like you to know that it is not a question and there is nothing you can say that will make it stop being true, and I only want to say it out loud once so that I have said it, and if that is all this ever is then I would like to go back to three weeks on and three weeks off and I would like us both to stop pretending it is a hardship, because it is not a hardship any more, it is the only arrangement I have ever had where anybody has ever told me the truth and I want to keep it. That is all. That is the whole of it. The pipe is a separate matter and we are having a conversation about the pipe in the autumn." It took a bit over two minutes and I have timed it since, on a clock on the wall in a kitchen in Anderry, and it is two minutes and eleven seconds, which I know because I have done it eleven times, because I do not trust myself to have got it right the first time and I wanted to know the length of it. He said: "Say the bit about 2016 again." "The caulking compound—" "No, the other bit. The part where you say it doesn't stop being true." I heard him sit down. I know that sound; I have heard that sound through a wall and through a boat cabin and across a car park in the rain. "Say that bit again, because I've been sitting here for two minutes and eleven seconds and I've got about nine things I'd say and every one of them is worse than the one before, and I want to hear the bit about 2016 again, and then I'm going to say a thing and it's going to be very short and you're not going to like it." "Jonah—" "I turned up at that house in March," said Jonah Pike, "with a plastic folder, in the rain, in a car park, and I did not tell you about the will, and you asked me in a car park why and I would not answer you, and I have not answered you for four months, and if you say that thing about 2016 again I am going to tell you that I have been in love with you since about 1994 and that I was eleven and I did not have the words for it and I have spent thirty years making a boat instead."