第20章 Handing Over

The mooring came through on the eleventh of August: twenty years, the same bank on the same side, with a break clause at fifteen years in favour of the district and a break clause at twenty in favour of nobody, which is the best you can get in England, and which took eleven sheets and one book and a plastic folder and a woman at a counter in Derby. The letter said: *the log book was noted and found to be in order, which the District does not usually say.* Nobody in this story is going to hear that sentence the way it should be heard, so I am going to say it properly. It is the only reward any institution has ever given me, and it was given to a book, and the reason the book was in order is that there are two handwritings in it, and one of them is a shopping list from the eleventh of June, 2022, in a plastic wallet, and the other one is a pipe. I want to end this properly, so I am going to do the thing I have never done in nine years of writing this, which is write a list. 1. The boat. Name: Olive, forty-one feet, built 1988, Southern Trader, hull number on the forepeak plate. Registered owner: R. E. Hartley, since the eighth of April, by a transfer of registered ownership signed on a Monday in a building forty miles away by a man who came round on a bicycle and did not ask. Mooring: twenty years, the same bank. Insurance: in my name, in my own name, which is a sentence I have had to say out loud to a person on the telephone twice in 2021 and once in a car park in the rain. 2. The money. Eleven thousand two hundred, and I have seven thousand eight of it, and the rest is three invoices over three months, and the practice has not been good this year, and the pipe was four hundred pounds of it and was worth every penny and I have said so in a book. 3. The house. My mother's, in Anderry, which Nan is in, and which is not mine and which I am not going to sell, and which has a room with a telephone table and a drawer under it, and the drawer is empty now, and there are eleven weeks of A4 in a box in the loft that I have not thrown away, because a woman in a booth told me that a diary is better than nothing and I would rather have the evidence. 4. The people. Ruth Hartnell, partner, nine years, who has known since 2017 and who has never once raised it, and who said in the February, "I would like to do the paperwork before that," and who was right, and who did the paperwork, and who is the only person alive who has read the whole of this. Teddy Vilar, fifty-one, who will not be the person who has the conversation, and who has nevertheless had about nine hundred of them, and who put a stool on the wrong side of a counter in a booth in Anderry and who served two coffees and said the true thing on a Saturday in March and has never mentioned it since. Marguerite Oyelaran, who witnessed a signature she was not asked to witness, and who is a woman of fifty-five who has signed for about nine hundred boats, and who put a needle under a man in a float and said "weeping" in a voice that meant she had a number in her head, and who does not know that I know, or knows and does not care, and who has still not told me whether the boat in March was on a good tide or a bad one, and who never will, and who I will see in about a year when the new survey is due, in a boatyard, in the rain, and who will hand me a clipboard. Dev, who is fifty-eight and cannot be told anything, and who let a boat stay on his hard for a month for nothing and who would deny it, and who is putting Bram's blue on a tool board in the week of the twelfth, at his own insistence, and who has never met Bram and will not have met him, and who mixed the colour from a book on the page with the engine bearings. The woman of seventy-eight on the bow, and her husband of seventy-four, who said, "Yes, he did," and never thought about it again, and who would be surprised, and should be, to learn that the whole of the last four years of two lives was decided on their account, in one second, in a canal above a lock, because somebody got everybody to the front before the barge came. Delia at the post office, and Priti the letting agent, and Padraig, and the two schoolteachers, and about nine hundred people in a yard in June who handed a stranger a piece of a life for eight pounds. 5. Nan Hart, sixty-eight, who will be sixty-nine in October, who has been in the wrong position since 1961, and who will be in it for ever, and who has never in her life been asked to do less, and who was asked to do less, and who did it, and who said it out loud on a Sunday: *I'm not going to hold your hand and I'm not going to wait for you.* 6. My mother, Rosalind Hart, 1935 to February, receptionist for twenty-two years, who asked four people in a room every day what they had done and was told the same four words, and who read four pages of a log book a year in a plastic wallet on a boat in a rain, and who had it copied by a solicitor in 2019, and who left me a practice and a flat and eleven thousand pounds worth of timber with ringworm in it, and who wrote *keep the use of the narrowboat Olive* and underlined it four times, and who looked at a light on a front deck in a garden in 1994 and said nothing, and who I will see in a chair in a room in a hospice in about seven years, and I will have about eleven minutes, and I know exactly what I am going to say, and it is going to be nothing, and I have written all of it down. 7. And the third letter. I am not going to write it. That is the only thing in this book that I have decided is not mine to say, and I have got a good reason and a bad reason and the bad reason is that I don't know it yet. The bad reason is that the whole of this — the two years, the silence, the one line in a book, the two-inch space in the paint, the plastic folder, the woman at the counter — all of it might have been a man doing a very careful, very patient, very stupid thing, which is building a boat out of one side of a woman he loves and putting it where she would find it, and waiting for her, and being quite sure that she would. And if that is what it was, then he has made one enormous error, which is that he has been sure. And Roz Hartley, who is forty-one, and who works in a practice in Anderry, and who has not been able to say a single true thing out loud for five years except two, got a tap out at the workshop door in the yard on the Thursday afternoon, and had to hold on to a plank for a second before she could answer it, and when she answered it she said, without a single word of preparation, in the voice of a woman who has finally had an argument and won it: "Come and see the boat."