Three Years of Not Saying It

I rang my mother at two o’clock from the granary steps.

“Oh,” she said. “You’ve found out about the boat.”

“Mum.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to write it on a card.” There was a sound of a kettle. “How is she? Has he had her painted? He said he wouldn’t have her painted.”

“He’s had a garboard put in.”

“What’s a garboard?”

“The bottom plank.”

“Well, that sounds necessary,” said my mother.

“You told me it was gone.”

“I told you it had gone somewhere, which it had.” A cupboard. A spoon. Susannah Maddox has never once in her life conducted a difficult conversation without also making a hot drink. “Greer, you had a face on you like a closed shop. You’d have said sell it. You’d have said it very sensibly and given me three reasons and one of them would have been mooring fees, and in about four…