Chapter 7 What the Will Said

My mother died on a Tuesday in February at about four in the morning, which is what she said she would do, and I found out because my mobile rang at ten past six and it was the hospice. I was at the practice. There were four appointments. I have run the timings of that morning about ninety times since and every single version of it comes out the same, which is that I was in surgery with a molar at half past nine and could not physically have got to the phone. Ruth covered. Ruth has covered for me for nine years. She came out of the room at the end of it and told me the patient's name, which was Gordon, and then told me the news, and then said, "There's tea in the front room, I've made a proper one." Nan Hart was sixty-eight and had been a receptionist at the practice for twenty-two of the forty-one years it had been my father's and then mine. She married again at fifty-one to a man called Trevor who turned out to be a decent man in every respect except that he was a great deal like everyone else, and Trevor died in 2019, and she had spent the last four years of her life in a flat in Anderry that she would not move out of and would not let anybody else into except me, and which she had filled, in the way my mother had filled every room she ever had, with far too much stuff and arranged it with a precision that was frankly frightening. I inherited the practice, the flat, the money in the building society, and a promise. "It is a real promise," said the solicitor, Prendergast, who had known her for twenty years and who had a voice like a man reading a shipping forecast. "Not a request. She used the word binding, which I have advised clients against using, and she used it four times, and she underlined it, and she asked me whether it was binding, and I said it was." "What is it." "She asks you to keep the boat." I did not have a reaction. I would like to report that I put my hand over my mouth, or that I had to sit down, or any of the things that people do in this situation in films. What I did was say, "Sorry, who has the boat?" "You do," said Mr Prendergast. "Well. You have the use of it. It is not in the will as an asset because it is not hers to leave and it never was hers to leave. The wording, and I'm reading it exactly as she drafted it, is that Roz shall keep the use of the narrowboat Olive for so long as the boat is maintained and the register is kept in the manner of a boat, and the reference is to a vessel of a kind and a construction not detailed, and to a place, the Kelder Cut, which is not a company, and I have been in practice for thirty-one years and I have never seen a clause like it in a will." "That's not a promise, that's a sentence somebody wrote at half past eleven at night." "It is a sentence somebody wrote at half past eleven at night," said Mr Prendergast, "and I am not your mother's solicitor, I am her executor's solicitor, and I will tell you the thing I have to tell you, which is that in the eleven weeks I have been dealing with this I have read a will in which a woman left her grandson a telescope and one in which a woman left her sister everything and mentioned her three times by wrong name, and I have not read one with a boat in it, and I am not going to tell you what I think it means, and I have told you what your mother said, and she said it four times and she underlined it." At the funeral, which was in a Methodist hall in Anderry with about forty people, my cousin Wanda told me that Nan had asked about the boat in the last fortnight. Wanda had driven her to the hospice twice. Wanda said she talked about the boat on the first visit and not on the second, and that on the second visit she talked about Trevor's Christmas in 1991, and that Wanda had taken notes on the Christmas because she'd thought it was a request, and it wasn't, it was just a story. I said, "Did she mention a light on the front deck." "Wanda, I have been grieving for six days—" "I know. I'm sorry. Was there a light." "She said, 'The light on the front deck needs a proper earth.' And I wrote it down because it sounded like a job." I stood in a Methodist hall in Anderry and looked at the clock, which is the thing my whole family does instead of looking at each other, and the clock in Methodist halls is always stopped at twenty to one, and I stood and looked at a stopped clock and thought: my mother was a receptionist for twenty-two years and she spent those twenty-two years watching people do work in a room she was not permitted to enter, and she came out at the end of every day and asked them what they'd done, and the answer was always the same four words, and the four words were, "I've been filling in," and the point she was making was never about the forms. I got out to the towpath at half past eleven that night and rang Nan. She answered. She was awake. She was always awake at half past eleven. "I've been through your mother's will," I said, "and there's a thing in it about the boat, and I want to say to you that I'll look after it, and I want to say it now so that you don't have to manage me about it later, and I want to say it because I know exactly what you're doing." "You don't know what I'm doing." "You've been speaking to Mr Prendergast," I said. "You knew about the will. You knew about the sentence with the boat in it. And you've been sitting on it since the funeral because you've worked out that I will not agree to a thing that mentions a person, and you are going to wait me out." There was a pause of about four seconds, which for Nan Hart is very fast, and which I had last heard on the morning she told me that Dad's affairs were not what they appeared to be, which was a Tuesday, and which was the morning my life changed, and which I had not thought about in twenty-six years until approximately eleven seconds before she did it again. "Roz," she said. "I've been in that flat for four days." "I know." "Your mother's will was made in August." I put my hand on a post. "Four years ago," said Nan. "Before you and Jonah separated. Eight months before. She wrote it in August of the year you were still living with him, and she did not change it, and the solicitor asked her twice whether that was an oversight, and she said it was not, and she underlined it, and he told me so in a letter in September and I've had it in a drawer for four years waiting for the phone to ring at six in the morning." "Nan—" "I'm not going to have this conversation at half past eleven at night on a towpath, because I am sixty-eight years old and I have had this speech ready since 2019." Her voice did not rise. It never rose. "The thing your mother wrote in that will is the only time in the whole of my life that she ever said a plain thing to me about your father, and she did not do it for me. She did it for a boat that is not hers, and the boat is the only subject the three of us ever managed, and you know that as well as I do, so you can put the phone down and think about it, and I will be in the flat on Friday, and if you come on Friday I will make a proper dinner and we will discuss the boat like two people, and if you don't come on Friday then you will ring me on the Saturday and say the same thing, and I will be here for it. Goodnight, love." She hung up. I stood on the towpath in the dark by the water, and it was February, and the water was up, and the boat was forty feet away with a light on the front deck, and from where I was standing, on the bank, you could see the light perfectly well.