Midsummer Week

We put Whimbrel in the water on the Tuesday evening of midsummer week, at high tide, in front of far too many people.

Wilf Chalmers had said he would want her on the hard by four and the trailer down the slipway at six and nobody at all standing about watching, and by ten past six there were nineteen people on the quay, including a woman from the parish newsletter with a camera.

“Told you,” said Wilf.

“You knew,” I said.

“Course I knew.” He spat. “Norfolk.”

It did not go well, which Wilf had also known.

The trailer bearings had gone, which we discovered at the top of the slipway; the tractor was at Deepdale with a broken hydraulic line; and the whole thing was eventually accomplished at about twenty past seven, on a rising tide with twenty minutes of usable water left, by six adults, a rope, a length of scaffold plank, and my mother shouting instructions from the top of the wall in a voice she has not used since she retired.

She went in stern first, crooked, and sat down in her own reflection, and floated about four inches high because larch takes a fortnight to take up.

And then she leaked, obviously, because she has been out of the water since October 2023, and everybody said she’ll take up, and Wilf said, “Two buckets a day, four days,” and went home for his tea.

I stood on the quay and looked at my father’s boat sitting in the creek with the light going gold on her.

Then I got in her and bailed for twenty minutes, which is exactly what he would have done.

Elias stood on the quay with the painter in his hand and did not get in.

“She’s yours,” he said, when I looked up. “I’m not getting in her till you ask me.”

“Get in the boat, Elias.”

“That’s not asking.”

“Will you please get in my father’s boat.”

“Yeah, all right,” he said, and got in, and put his foot straight through nothing at all, because Wilf Chalmers had done the floorboards in March.

Roy came down at half seven.

He is worse. I am not going to pretend about that, because pretending is how this whole thing started. He has been at Marram for two and a half years and there has been a step down since Christmas; he does not walk far now and there is a wheelchair for anything over about thirty metres, and there are weeks where he does not have a good hour at all.

But it was midsummer and the light was doing what it does here in the last week of June, which is to go on and on at an angle until about half past ten, and they brought him down in the car and Elias pushed him along the quay and put him in the chair with the arms in the lee of the harbourmaster’s hut, with a blanket, facing the water.

He had a good hour.

“That’s a nice boat,” he said.

“She’s leaking.”

“They all do.” He watched me bail for a bit. “That’s Maddox’s boat.”

“It is,” I said. “It’s mine now.”

“Right you are,” said Roy.

Then he looked up the hill, and said, “Wants doing again, that,” and I turned round, and he was looking at the holm oak.

“What does?”

“She’s putting it all back on the one side,” he said. “You want to be up there every three or four year with that or you’ll have the same job again.”

Which is, to the word, the recommendation in the second paragraph of my own report, and which I have never said out loud in front of him.

“I’ll put it in the diary,” I said.

“You do that, duck.”

The tree has put four hundred millimetres of new growth on the south-west side since September, which is exactly what I told Cleo it would do, and the brace has done nothing whatsoever except on the night of the eleventh of February, when it did everything.

Cleo came down at eight with Dev and a bag of cans.

He did not know her.

She had known it was fifty-fifty walking along the quay and she did it anyway, which she does now, every time, without negotiating with herself about it first, and she crouched down in front of his chair and said, “Hello, Roy. I’m Cleo. I’m Angela’s girl,” and he said, “Are you! Well!” with great warmth, and asked her whether she’d come far.

“Thirty-five minutes,” said Cleo.

“That’s not far.”

“It’s not bad.”

“You want to watch that road at Stiffkey,” said Roy.

And she said, “I do, I know, it’s terrible,” and sat down on the edge of the wall next to him and talked to him about the road at Stiffkey for twenty minutes.

Afterwards she came and sat on the bow of the boat with her feet on the foredeck and her back against the mast, which I had not yet stayed properly, and we passed a can back and forth, and she cried for about ninety seconds in a completely businesslike way and then stopped.

“It’s fine,” she said.

“It isn’t.”

“No.” She wiped her face. “It isn’t. But he had a good hour and he told you off about a tree and he knows your boat, and I’ll take it.” She blew her nose. “I’ve got a woman in Terrington who’s forty-one and having her first and her mother’s got early onset and she can’t be there, and I sat in that kitchen on Monday and I thought, right, well, at least I know what this is.”

“That’s a horrible upside.”

“It’s the only one going,” said Cleo.

We have not finished. I should say so, because I know how this sort of thing usually gets written.

October took four evenings. Four, in her kitchen in Lynn, between shifts, and the second one was the worst thing that has ever happened to me and I drove back to Saltmere at one in the morning and sat in the car outside Church Cottage for half an hour before I could go in. She said things she had been saving since 2022 and they were all accurate.

We did the third one in November and the fourth in January, and at the end of the fourth one she said, “Right, I think that’s most of it,” and then, at the door, “There’s a bit I’ve still got. I’m keeping it. I’ll get it out at some point and it won’t be convenient.”

And in June, on a quay, with her feet on my father’s foredeck, she said: “By the way. I’ve still got that bit.”

“I know.”

“Just so you know.”

“I know, Cleo.”

“Good,” she said, and drank the rest of the can.

The rest of it, briefly, because it is all extremely ordinary and that is the point.

Hilary rang me on the sixth of November, six weeks to the day, and said yes, and then said, “It was not easy and you will never hear a word about how,” and I started in the East region on the fourth of January. I have eleven properties and a budget I could weep about. The veteran oak post went to a man from the Chilterns in the middle of January and he will be very good and I sent him a card.

I do not love the East region yet. I said I would be bored by June and I am not bored, I am irritated, which is different and better: there is a churchyard in Suffolk with nine ancient yews in it and a parochial church council who want them all reduced to head height because of a wall, and I have been fighting them since February and I am going to win and it is going to take another year.

I let the York flat to two ecologists. They have finished the second bedroom, which I never did, and they sent me a photograph of it and I had a small private crisis about it in a car park in Beccles.

Church Cottage was mine until the end of April. We moved in together on the fourteenth of March, six weeks early, entirely without ceremony, because the boiler finally died on a Tuesday and I ended up in Elias’s house with a bag and never went back for the rest of it. We talked about it in March, as agreed, sitting on the floor, and the conversation took forty minutes and both of us had a list.

We are not good at everything, either.

We had a serious argument in April about whether to buy a dishwasher for a kitchen that does not have room for one. It lasted four days. On the third day I said something about his mother’s kitchen that I should not have said, and on the fourth day he said, entirely reasonably, that I had been doing the thing where I present a decision as a survey, and we did not speak for an evening, and then we did, and we have not bought a dishwasher, and I am going to win that one in the autumn.

He takes Thursdays and Sundays off now, which he has not done since 2019. Tomasz has been contracts manager since October and has opinions about the way Elias writes a quote and is correct about all of them.

We go to Marram on Sundays, both of us. In November Elias asked Cleo — asked, in her kitchen, with a folder, having told her the numbers first — whether they should move Roy nearer Norwich, and the two of them talked about it for three weeks and decided no, because he knows the light in that day room and there is a woman called Eileen there he sits next to, and that is worth more than forty minutes of anybody’s driving.

At about half nine that Tuesday evening in June, with the light still going and the tide just off the top and the boat about two inches fuller of water than she had been an hour before, I went and sat on the wall next to Elias with a mug of tea.

Roy had gone back. Cleo and Dev were on the quay with Wilf, and Dev was doing the card trick, which he has improved by exactly one card in nine months and which is now, if anything, worse.

A bird went over low, going east, fast, with a hard clipped call.

“Whimbrel,” I said.

“Whimbrel,” he agreed, without looking up.

“I got one.”

“They’re going through. You’ll get forty this week if you’re up early.”

“Are you going to knock on my door at ten past five?”

“I live with you,” said Elias. “I’ll nudge you and you’ll be horrible about it.”

I drank my tea down to about an inch and set the mug on the wall between us, which is where it has been going for a year now, and which neither of us has ever mentioned.

He looked at it.

“Can I have that?” he said.

And I want to be clear about what that was, because from outside it was a man asking for a mouthful of cold tea.

Seven years he took that without asking, and a year of not taking it at all, and one evening in September on a tailgate where I pushed it four inches towards him and neither of us said a word, because saying a word would have been the whole thing and we were not ready to have the whole thing.

“Yes,” I said.

So he picked it up and drank it, and put it back down on the wall, and put his hand flat on my back between my shoulder blades, and we sat there while the light went out of the creek.

I reached over and knocked twice on his forearm with two knuckles, which is a thing I have started doing and which he has never asked about.

It answered the way a good one does. No hollow in it at all.