Epilogue
It rains, of course. It is Bergen and it is January and the light goes at a quarter to four, and it has rained for six days and it will rain for six more, and my father has not mentioned it once, because to mention rain in this city is to admit that you have noticed the sea.
We do it in the yard.
There are nine of us.
That is not a number I chose and I want that written down, because everybody thinks I chose it.
I made a list on the back of an envelope in Milan in August and I wrote down every person on this earth I would want standing in my father’s yard, and there were nine, and I counted them three times, and I laughed, and then I sat down on the floor of my kitchen and I did not laugh.
Halvor Lindqvist, seventy four, in a suit he bought in 1988 and has worn to four funerals and now this.
Ines Ferrari, who cried in the taxi from the airport and has denied it since.
Marco Belotti, who has never left Italy before and who has spent two days looking at my father’s steam box the way other men look at a cathedral.
Giulia.
Theo, who came alone, because his wife is nine months and could not fly, and who has telephoned Barnes six times since Thursday.
Celine Marchetti, who flew from Turin, and who stood in the door of the shed with her hands in her coat pockets for about six seconds before I got to her, and who I have now put next to Theo Kastellanos at a table of nine people, on purpose, because I am not a good woman and I have never pretended to be.
They have not spoken to each other in six years.
He signed the papers. She is the woman four hundred people watched walk into a ballroom in a dress she did not choose, and she has spent six years being called a name in three languages for a thing she did not do, and Theo Kastellanos, who is the good one, who has always been the good one, put his signature at the bottom of the annulment that made it look true.
They spoke once today. At the rail, outside, in the rain, for about ninety seconds.
I did not hear it and I am not going to ask, and neither of them has looked at the other since.
Sophia, six, in yellow, because there was a very long conversation about it in April and she won.
And Adrian, in his own suit, which is nine years old and which he had let out at the shoulders in Milan in November because he does not have the body he had when he bought it, because he has spent a year on his knees on a floor and six weeks of last summer in a boatyard in Bergen doing what my father told him to do.
My father did not speak to him for nine days.
Nine days. He put him on the end of a plank with a plane in his hand on the first morning and he said, take that off, and he came back in the afternoon and looked at it and said nothing at all, and this went on for nine days, and Adrian Kastellanos, who has closed a hundred and ten million euros across a table in Rotterdam, went back to that plank every morning at seven o’clock and did not ask my father one single question.
On the tenth day Halvor stood next to him and looked at what he had done and said, “It is not bad.”
That is what it took. That is the whole grovel, at the end of it. Nine days on a plank in the rain.
And I have never told my father about the airport, and I am not going to, and he is standing over there in a suit from 1988 with his hand on the back of a chair, alive, at seventy four, which is the only argument I have ever been able to make in my own defence and I have never once made it out loud.
We are already married. That is the joke of the entire afternoon and everybody in the shed knows it.
We have been married for ten years. The annulment was never completed, there is a file in London with a gap in it, and I have been that man’s wife through the whole of it, through Turin and through Milan and through a hospital in July with nobody in the corridor, and it turns out that the single most humiliating fact of my life was also the one that meant I never had to ask him for anything today.
So it is not a wedding. I have said that to nine people and none of them are listening.
My father calls it a launching.
He built her a boat.
He started it eighteen months ago, the week the floor came out of the Cassaro, and he did not tell me, and he did not tell her, and he built it out of larch on oak in the shed at Sandviken in his seventy fourth year with his hands, which shake now, which have shaken since March, and which do not shake when they are on a plane.
She is fourteen feet. She is a faering, which is the boat they have built on this coast for a thousand years and which nobody wants any more.
She has four oars in her and a little lug sail that my father sewed himself and would not let anybody see, and she is the ugliest colour I have ever seen on a boat in my life, and she is that colour because in March my father telephoned Milan and asked a five year old what colour a boat should be.
Yellow.
They go in the water at four o’clock, in the dark, under two lamps on a cable that my father ran out along the slip yesterday and would not let anybody help him with.
Marco and Theo and Adrian carry her down on their shoulders and Marco says something in Italian that makes Ines put her hand over her mouth, and my father stands at the top of the slipway with his hands behind his back and does not help, because he is seventy four and because he has watched a hundred and forty of them go down that slip and he has never once helped.
And then he goes and gets the book.
Every yard has one. My father’s is bound in canvas and it has been on the same nail since 1961 and there is a hull in it for every boat that has come out of that shed, one hundred and forty of them, with a number, and a date, and the timber, and the name.
He has never let anybody touch it. Not me. Not my mother. Not in fifty years.
He puts it down on the bench and he opens it at the next clean line and he writes, in pencil, in a hand like a fence:
141. Larch on oak. 14ft. January.
And then he holds the pencil out over his shoulder without turning round.
“Owner,” Halvor says.
And my daughter comes up out of the wet grass in her yellow coat and takes the pencil out of her grandfather’s hand.
She has been talking about this for four months.
She asked me at a kitchen table in Milan in June whether she was allowed to change it and I said yes, and she said, all of it, and I said, all of it, and I want to be very clear that I did not say one word after that, not one, and I sat on my hands, and Ines will tell you what it cost me.
She thought about it for thirteen weeks.
She kept Lindqvist. She kept it because it is on the drawings, she says, and because I need it, she says, and because if there are two of us with it then there is a spare.
And then she took the other one.
I asked her why, once, in a kitchen, carefully, the way you go into a wall you do not know the depth of.
And Sophia said, “Nobody was using it.”
She writes it now, on the bench, in the shed, in front of nine people and a boat, and she writes it in block capitals because that is the only way she writes, and it is far too long for the box, and she gets to the edge of the page and she does not stop, she takes it round the corner and up the side, and she is pressing so hard that she goes through into hull one hundred and forty.
And my father, Halvor Lindqvist, who has entered a hundred and forty hulls in that book since 1961 and who has never in fifty years let another human being put a mark in it, stands with his hands behind his back and watches a six year old ruin a page and does not say one word.
She puts the pencil down.
She stands back and looks at it, with her whole face, the way she does everything, and she is not pleased and she is not shy, she is checking it, the way you check a line.
Then she reads it out.
She reads it out loud, once, to the shed, in a voice much too big for her, over the rain on the roof and the water going under the slip, and there are nine people in that boatyard and every one of them hears her do it.
And I stand at the bench in my father’s shed with sawdust on the only dress I own and I look at the man next to me.
He is looking at his daughter.
He is completely still. He has his hands at his sides. He is not going to reach for her, he has never once reached for her, he has waited two years for a child to come to him and he will wait ten more, and his face is doing something that I am not going to write down because it belongs to him.
Six years ago last November, a man stood at the top of a room in London and watched four hundred people take my name off me.
And he said nothing.
I am standing in my father’s boatyard in Bergen in the rain with my hand in that man’s hand.
And I am watching our daughter take his.