第3章 A Fair Valuation

Marguerite Oyelaran came at half past nine on the Tuesday with a clipboard and a thermos and the manner of a woman who had already been to eleven boats that morning and had formed an opinion about the cut as a whole. She was perhaps fifty-five. She had a raincoat that had been expensive once and a pair of boots that had not. She asked to see the boat's papers first, which I thought was a good sign, and then she went down into the bow with a torch, and came up after a while and wrote for a long time. "Right," she said. "Two things. One is a hull survey." "How bad." "You've got a compression set in the aft bilge and there's water coming in at the deck, and I want to know whether that's the scuppers or the hull seams, and that's a job for somebody with a proper gauge and a boat out of the water, and it will not be cheap, and I'd say between four and six hundred pounds, and I want to say before anybody says anything that four to six hundred is the cheapest money anybody in this cut will spend this year, because there are four boats on this stretch alone that are going to fail inspection and the owners all know it and none of them are getting on with it." "And the second thing?" "The second thing is your log book." She put her clipboard down on the cabin roof. "Where is it?" I got it out of the drawer under the chart table. It is a hardback A5 book with a marbled cover that cost about two pounds, and it has a printed page for every week, and it is, as of the last four years, in my handwriting top to bottom. Marguerite Oyelaran turned it over. She did not open it. She looked at the size of it and then she looked at my handwriting on the page she could see, which was a list, because it is always a list. "Who signs it?" "We both do. It's the handover. Three weeks on, three weeks off. Whoever's coming off signs the book and hands it to whoever's going on." "And on the weeks you're on?" "Jonah fills in my half." Marguerite Oyelaran looked up. "This is the whole of the book?" "Every week since we bought her." "May I look at a page in the middle. Not this one. Somewhere in the middle." I gave it to her, and she turned to about a third of the way in, and read a page, and then turned a few more, and then closed it, and gave it back to me, and did not say anything for a moment, in the way people do not say anything when they are deciding how much of it to say. "I want to be quite clear about what I am about to say," she said. "I don't know your circumstances and it's none of my business and I'm not going to ask. But I have been doing this for twenty-six years and I have signed for about nine hundred boats and I will tell you what I have learned, which is that the handover book is the only document in this entire arrangement that anybody ever honours." "That's a nice thing to say about our marriage." "It isn't about your marriage. It's about your boat." She picked her clipboard back up. "The Mooring Agreement wants a tenancy reference. The Boat Safety Certificate wants a name and an address for the registered keeper. Neither of those cares who sleeps where. What they both want to know is that there is one person who is answerable, and that the boat is kept as a boat and not as a place where two people are avoiding each other. And the way you prove that, and it's the only way anybody has ever proved it, is a book that gets filled in and signed." "Which is what I have been doing." "Which is what you have been doing," she said. "On your own. In a neat hand. In a book, on a Thursday, on your own, for two years." I felt the back of my neck go hot, which is a thing that happens to me now, at forty-one, and which did not happen to me at twenty-five, and which I resent. "There's a technical problem," Marguerite Oyelaran went on, briskly, "which is that a book that is filled in by one person and signed by one person, where the other signatory never writes anything, is not a record of a shared custody arrangement. It's a diary. And a diary is fine. I'd rather it were a diary than nothing. But it will not support a twenty-year Mooring Agreement, because a twenty-year Mooring Agreement wants to know what happens if you stop, and if the answer is that one of you stops turning up and starts writing the other one's weeks for her, then nobody in that office is going to sign it, and they'll be right not to." The rain started again. It always starts again. "So what are you telling me," I said. "You're telling me that Jonah and I have to actually speak to each other." "I'm telling you," said Marguerite Oyelaran, "that you have to actually sign the book. That's all. I don't care whether you speak. I've been assessing boats for a quarter of a century and I have never once in my life required two people to be in love on a mooring. I require two people to be able to say that on the sixth of March the gearbox was checked. And you can do that." She shut the clipboard. "I'll put the survey in for the Thursday after. You'll want a second slot for the referral to the mooring office, and I warn you now, they'll want the log book, and you'll want to bring it, and if it's in one handwriting you may as well not bring it." She got up onto the bank, and then turned round. "The bit about the cut, though," she said. "You said the boat's on a lay-by below the second lock, and I want you to know that the lay-by's got a problem and it isn't yours. The three boats either side of you have all been given the same notice, and when they go, you'll be the only one left on a bend with no passing place, and the towpath there is single-track with a gate, and that gate is in a state." She looked at her boots. "You'll want to look at the gate."