Chapter 5 The Surveyor Comes Back

Marguerite Oyelaran came back on the Thursday with a printed report and a bad face, and the bad face was worse than the report, because a report is a thing you can argue with. "The hull survey's booked for the fourteenth of April," she said. "I want to move it. 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 you'll not argue because it's a hundred and forty pounds and I have already got two of you on the cut that I am not going to enjoy." "What about the twenty-year Mooring Agreement?" "That's gone." "Since when." "Since Tuesday, when the district's solicitor read your registration," said Marguerite Oyelaran, and put the printout on the cabin roof, and squared it up with her thumb, and did not hand it to me. "You're not a partnership and you're not a co-owner, and the registered keeper of a narrowboat has to be a single named person with a single address, and your name's off it. It's on his. That's correct and it's how it should be and it is the single greatest piece of good luck either of you has had in four years, because in November when his name comes off, there is no boat." The rain came on the way it comes on, sideways, off the cutting above the wharf. "So the boat is his," I said. "The boat is his," she said. "And you are a person who is on it three weeks out of four, and I have to write something in a box about that, and what am I going to write in the box, Roz." "Write that it's a shared arrangement." "I have written that eleven times this year on this cut and every single time the other party's solicitor has pulled it apart, because there is no such thing as a shared arrangement in the law of this country, there is a sole owner and there is a person with no claim at all, and if he sells her, or he dies, or he gets a girlfriend who doesn't like you being on the boat, then you are a person who is on a boat with no right to be and no way to leave except off the front step into the cut." Well. That was a bit much for a Tuesday on a wharf. "Sit down," I said, and there was nowhere to sit, so I sat down on the deck and she did not. "I sat down in a chair in your cabin this morning while you were at work and I read your log book properly, the whole thing, all four years, and I'll tell you exactly what I found and then I'll tell you what I think you want to do about it." She took the printout back off the roof. "Two thousand and forty-one signatures. Two thousand and forty-one of them in one hand. Yours. He has signed twice. Once in 2018 before the arrangement started, when the boat was new to both of you, and once in the November, and you did not notice the November, because the November page is in a neat column with your other writing on it and it does not look like a different thing happening." I had a chair. There was a chair inside, in the cabin, on the starboard side, with a cushion on it, and I had been sitting in it for six years. I got up off the deck and got into it. "When was the November," I said. "The twenty-sixth." "Twenty-sixth of what month." Marguerite Oyelaran looked at me for a moment longer than was comfortable. "November," she said. "Roz, the registration was served in December. He has not been the registered keeper since the twenty-sixth of November and nobody told you, and the letter went to an address in Anderry, and if the letter had gone to the boat it would have gone to the boat, and it went to the address because the address is the one on the registration, and the one on the registration is his, and it's been his since the boat was new, and it has been the one at Marrow Wharf in this cabin for six years, and it is your address, and you have been living at the registered address of your own boat." I sat in a chair on a narrowboat and worked it out, and it took me a while, and while I was working it out I was aware of two things. The first was that I had a dental patient at four o'clock who was having a crown fitted and had been told to allow two hours, and it was quarter past one, and I was on a boat in a cutting. The second was that Jonah Pike had let a registration lapse, quietly, in the November, on a boat that was legally his alone, and had then carried on coming to the lay-by with a toolbox on his bicycle, and had biked eleven miles in the rain to file a lock plate that I had told him was seized. I got the phone out and I rang the practice and I asked Ruth to move the four o'clock. She asked me why. I said I was at the wharf. She said you are at work, Roz, it is Tuesday, you are at work until six. "I know," I said. "I'll explain on Thursday. Move the crown to Thursday and put the man on a temporary and tell him I'm sorry and give him the good paste." "Roz." "He'll not mind. He's had a temporary in since February. Move the crown." When I put the phone down my hands were doing a thing I did not like, so I put them in my cardigan pockets, and Marguerite Oyelaran, who had been watching me do it with an expression of great professional patience, said: "Right," she said. "So here's the position. That boat belongs to him. You have no claim on it and no claim on anything in it and no claim on the barrel at the front with the daffodils in it. If you want to be on it in three years' time you either buy a share, and you can't buy a share of a boat that isn't a partnership, and you'd have to form a partnership, and I've seen men try that and it ends in a solicitor's office in six months; or you get a proper written agreement about your weeks, made by two solicitors, and you keep it on the boat, and you don't rely on a handover book, and you don't rely on him." "And if I do neither?" "Then in three years' time you'll be forty-four and you'll have six hundred pounds of daffodil bulbs' worth of nothing and he'll have sold her and gone to Cornwall," said Marguerite Oyelaran, "and that's the worst case, and it's the most likely one, because he does not want the boat, Roz, he's never wanted the boat. He wanted the boat for four years because it was the only room in the world that was still yours and his, and now that it's a legal matter he can't even get the log book signed, and he will not fight for it, because he's not that kind of man and he never has been." She picked up her clipboard. "The crane is Friday," she said. "Ring the yard. And Roz—" "Yes." "Get him to sign the book. Not the boat. The book. Whatever else you two have or haven't got sorted, that is the only thing in this whole business that costs nothing and is worth something. A man who signs a book is a man who intends to still be here in April."