The Hoy on a Tuesday

The quiz at the Hoy is on a Tuesday and has been since 1991, and I was wedged in at the wall end of a bench built for four with Elias on my left, because there was nowhere else, and his arm along the back of it because there was nowhere else for that either.

“Question one. What is a dodman?”

“A boat,” said Dev.

“Snail,” said Tomasz.

“Snail?”

“Snail. Write snail.” Tomasz did not look up. “I have been here nineteen years and I listen, which is more than I can say for any of you.”

We came fourth out of nine. At about half nine Dev did the card trick, badly on purpose and then perfectly, and produced the seven of clubs from under Tomasz’s pint, and Derek had to say ladies and gentlemen twice.

“I hate him,” said Cleo, with her whole face shining. “I hate him and I’m marrying him on Saturday.”

I want to describe the next two hours accurately, because I think they matter more than most of what happened that week and nothing in them is dramatic. I want to describe the next two hours accurately, because I think they matter more than most of what happened that week and nothing in them is dramatic.

Four people came over to our table. Not to Cleo, who is the bride, and not to me, who was the novelty. To Elias.

A woman of about sixty, in a fleece, who wanted to know whether the new sluice at Deepdale would mean her bottom field went again like it did in ‘21, and who stood there with her arms folded while he drew the answer on a beer mat, and who went away apparently satisfied, having said, at the end, “Your father’d be spitting,” in a tone that meant something like affection.

A man who wanted a job for his son.

A man who did not want anything at all and who talked about a gearbox for twenty minutes.

And a very old man on a stick who put a hand on Elias’s shoulder on the way past and said, “That was good, what you done for Maureen,” and kept walking, and did not explain, and Elias said “all right, Ron,” to a man who was already six feet away and did not turn round.

I sat there with half a lager and watched.

Because I was here, you see. I was here in 2019 and 2020, on and off, in the passenger seat and the back room and the car park, and in those days this village looked at Elias Tarrant the way a village looks at a man who is going to inherit something — with a slight wariness about which way he would go. Roy Tarrant built the walls. Everybody’s bottom field was somebody’s opinion about Roy Tarrant.

And then his son took a machine to four hundred metres of his father’s life’s work and let the sea into it.

I had assumed — five years, from Yorkshire — that it had cost him the village. I had assumed there was a version of him now who was tolerated, who drank somewhere else, who had won an argument and lost a place.

He was bought three pints in two hours and could not get to the toilet without a conversation.

“You’re staring,” said Cleo, in my ear.

“I’m observing.”

“You’re observing a man drink a pint.”

“I’m observing a man being asked about a sluice.”

“God, isn’t it grim.” She put her chin on my shoulder. “He’s a local celebrity. It’s revolting. He hates it.”

“Does he?”

“He goes bright red.” Cleo took a crisp off my plate. “Do you know what I love about you being here?”

“What?”

“You laughed. Twice. I’ve heard you on the phone for three years and you do this thing where you say something funny in a completely flat voice and then you don’t laugh at anything, and tonight you laughed at Dev dropping a card and you did that horrible snort.”

“I don’t snort.”

“You absolutely snort, and I’ve missed it,” said Cleo, and went off to the bar for more crisps, because she is the only person I know who can say a thing like that and then leave.

I sat with it.

It was, I worked out, ten past ten on Tuesday, and I had not thought about the shortlist since Sunday afternoon.

That is not a small thing. The Linnet Trust is making a national veteran tree lead in January and there are three of us on the list, and I have thought about it, on a conservative estimate, eight or nine times a day since the fourteenth of July. I have thought about it in the shower and on the A64 and at a funeral. I had not thought about it since I stood on a kitchen chair on Chapel Rise. I had also not thought about my flat, where the second bedroom has been a bedroom-shaped pile of skirting board since February, and I had not thought about my mother, who I had told I would ring on Sunday and had not.

“He does not drink on a Monday,” said Tomasz.

I turned. He was looking at Elias across the room, where Elias was being shown something on a phone by the man with the gearbox.

“Sorry?”

“Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday,” said Tomasz. “He does not drink on those. It is Wednesday and Friday and Saturday, he can have a beer. The others, no.” He turned his glass round on the mat. “I have watched this for two years. I say to him, Elias, have one beer, it’s forty minutes in a car. He says it is the diesel.”

“What’s the diesel?”

“Nothing is the diesel,” said Tomasz. “Wells is the diesel.”

Cleo came back to the table with three packets of crisps in her teeth and the conversation went somewhere else, and I said nothing at all, and I looked at the back of Elias Tarrant’s head across a pub and did some arithmetic I did not like.

Four nights a week. Twenty-five minutes each way. For two years.

At twenty past eleven Bea started putting chairs on tables, which is how the Hoy expresses itself, and we all went out into the lane in a mass, and Cleo hugged four people, and Dev was persuaded to do the trick one final time for Derek, and got it wrong, on purpose, and refused to do it again.

Wilf Chalmers came out last.

I had not spoken to him. He had been at the end of the bar all evening on the same stool with the same half, and had said — I counted, because I count things — nine words in four hours, six of which were “no” to the quiz. He is seventy-eight and about five foot four and shaped like a hand tool, and he has built or rebuilt, by Bea’s estimate, sixty boats.

He stopped by Elias on his way to the gate.

“You putting her in next year,” he said. It was not a question, particularly.

“We’ll see, Wilf.”

“She’s been ready since March.”

“I know.”

“Waste,” said Wilf, and went out of the gate and up the hill, and that was word number ten, and I have thought about the way he said it perhaps four hundred times since.

I waited until he was out of earshot.

“What boat?”

“One of his.”

“You’ve got a boat in Wilf Chalmers’ shed?”

“Wilf’s shed’s full of other people’s boats,” said Elias. “That’s the whole business model.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he said.

And that was that. He said goodnight to his sister, and he picked up the two crates of empty glasses Bea had left by the door and carried them in without being asked, and we walked back along the quay in a group of five in the dark, and Cleo sang, badly.

The tide was right in. Ten to midnight, nearly the top of it, and the whole creek was full and flat and black, with the lights of the Herring House lying on it in long wobbling strings, and the boats on the moorings had all swung to face the same way, which they do about twenty minutes before the turn, and which I used to think was beautiful and now know is arithmetic.

“Goodnight, Maddox,” said Cleo, at the door.

“Night.”

Upstairs, on the landing where the corridor takes a step down, I stopped and looked at the two doors.

AVOCET. And, four feet further along than it needed to be, a pair of boots with the laces tucked in.

I went to bed and lay there and listened to the tide turn, which you can hear in that building if you know what you are listening for, and at some point in the small hours I gave up pretending and got my phone off the sill and looked at the photograph on Cleo’s fridge again — Roy and Angela in 1986, under a tree with a crack in it — and then, because my thumb had its own plans, at a photograph from 2009 of my father on a slipway at Brancaster with a paint tin in one hand, squinting, and a boat behind him with her name in gold leaf, done badly, by him.

Six weeks after he died I had asked my mother what was happening about the boat and she had said, in the voice she uses for admin, That’s gone, love. Don’t think about it.

And I hadn’t. That is the thing. For three years I had not thought about it once, on purpose, with real discipline, the way you don’t put your tongue in a socket.