‘I think,’ I told him, ‘that the trouble with you and your doer-uppers, Louis, is that you never do do them up. You never get round to it, do you? You lose interest and start on something else and you don’t finish that either. Because you lose interest again and—’
‘I’m thinking of doing it out in mahogany,’ Louis said. ‘I’ll put some partition walls up and get it divided into rooms. Bathroom here, galley there, living quarters here, guest bedroom there.’
‘Where are you putting the games room, spa and indoor swimming area, Louis?’ I asked. But he ignored me as if I hadn’t spoken.
‘It’s going to be something special once it’s done.’
‘It’ll be something special if it ever does get done. This is the story of your life to date, Louis,’ I said. ‘Things taken on and not seen through. Great projects started and never completed. Remember that astronomical telescope you were going to make when we were kids?’
‘I made a start on it but was trammelled by lack of proper equipment,’ he said.
‘Louis,’ I reminded him, ‘you were going to grind your own lenses. And the bits of glass were a yard across and six inches thick.’
‘If I was doing it today, I’d do it differently,’ Louis said.
‘Okay, Louis. If you really want my opinion – and I know you don’t – the first thing I’d do to this boat if I were you – apart from sell it – is to put a proper heating system in. Get a wood-burning stove or something. That little cooker is not going to warm this boat. Not once winter comes. It’s going to be so cold in here come January that brass will crack.’
‘We don’t need any stoves,’ Louis told me. ‘We’re tough.’
‘You may be tough,’ I said. ‘But when winter comes I’m going to buy myself a portable gas heater for the flat.’
I seem to recollect that Louis spent a lot of time that winter round at our apartment, sleeping on the sofa. He and my girlfriend Iona got on okay. But then they were both bohemians and weren’t paying any rent.
The fact was that when it came to being tough, I only really helped the tough guys out when they were busy. My parents had wanted a girl as their second child, only they hadn’t got one, they had got me. According to my mother I was born so scrawny I wasn’t expected to live, but live I did. Even now there are people who bear grudges about that. But I can’t do anything about it.
Spring came and the air got warmer and Louis went back to his boat. Sometimes the harbour master would move the boat on a whim and Louis would go home after a night in the pub to find his boat gone from its moorings, and he would have to tramp round the harbour looking for it, which could take him an hour or more. He fell in the water a few times, but it was only to be expected and was probably character-building, and it never seemed to do him any harm, apart from the difficulty he had in drying his clothes.
Looking back now, I see that was the start of his sartorial problems and when he first began aiming for the rough-sleeper look, which he seemed to so effortlessly accomplish. He ripped his trousers once and walked round for a week with the leg flapping until Iona sewed it up for him, even though she was a strong feminist and it was old-style women’s work.
‘You should be able to sew up your own trousers, Louis,’ she told him.
‘I’m working on it,’ he said.
‘I thought you were working on your boat,’ I told him.
‘I’m working on them both.’
He was actually working on neither. He had a new interest, making occasional tables.
‘Does that mean the tables are for particular occasions, Louis? Or does it mean you just make them occasionally?’
He just looked at me as if I wasn’t there and didn’t answer.
I still have one of his occasional tables, sitting right there in the dining room. Tile inlaid surface and pine legs. It’s warped and buckled a little with the passing of the years, but it’s lasted the course. It’s outlived its maker in any event. It wasn’t that Louis couldn’t do things, it was that he couldn’t make money out of them. Nor was he a natural craftsman, he was more one by ambition and willpower. He lost his temper with inanimate objects quite a lot. I could be wrong but I believe that natural craftsmen don’t do that – they know how to bend the inanimate to their will, and how to persuade it into shape with cajoling and subtlety and cunning. And that’s the craft of it.
Louis’ savings slowly dwindled and he couldn’t be a bohemian any more. He went and got a manual job assembling generators. It was just a stop-gap thing, like so many of those jobs were. He stop-gapped for almost the rest of his life. And maybe I’m wrong about his stopping being a bohemian. Maybe he was just a bohemian in a nine to five job; the bohemianism was in his soul.
He never did do the boat up, nor did he ever install a stove. He ended up hauling the boat out of the water and chopping it up for firewood.
But before that, we had a crisis.
The phone rang in the flat and it was a woman with a French-sounding accent.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I was given this number and I want to speak to Louis.’
‘Who’s calling?’ I said.
‘Chancelle,’ she said. ‘I’m at the airport and have flown over to get back together with Louis and I want to have his babies.’
‘Who gave you my number?’
‘Your mother.’
‘I see. Well, Louis doesn’t live here, Chancelle—’ She stifled a sob. ‘That is, he lives near, but this is my place.’
‘But I have come all this way—’
‘Wouldn’t it have been better to take soundings first?’
‘What is this – take soundings?’
‘Chancelle, have you communicated with Louis about this? You haven’t seen each other in, what, three, four years? Have you written to him? Was he expecting you?’
‘I love Louis so much and want to have his babies.’
‘Well, you’ll need to speak to Louis about that. I don’t know where he stands on babies. That’s something you’ll need to discuss.’
‘I am coming to see him.’
‘Chancelle—’
‘I am getting on the bus.’
‘Chancelle, you don’t even know—’
‘Your mother gave me your address. I’ll be there tonight. Tell Louis I love him.’
The phone went dead.
‘Who was that?’ Iona said.
‘Chancelle,’ I explained. ‘Louis’ ex from Canada. She’s landed at Heathrow.’
‘What does she want?’
‘She wants to have his babies.’
Iona gave me a strange and narrow-eyed look. I didn’t know then that she wanted to have my babies. But I didn’t want any babies at that time in my life. Eventually despairing of never having any babies, Iona went off to have them with somebody else.
‘Well, is he expecting her?’
‘I don’t think he’s heard from her in years.’
I found Louis down at the docks, chewing the fat with his neighbours. Wherever you go in the world you will find men with boats chewing the fat. They rarely venture anywhere. Their boats are usually out of the water and need something doing to them. There’s some rubbing down going on, or some filling in, or they’re painting the hull in de-fouling liquid. The