This is the Life

I had to tell him that it wasn’t even my book, I’d been loaned it, and it was none of his damned business what I read as I would read whatever I liked and he could go and screw himself and he’d better get me another copy soon as I was due to return the book to the boy I’d borrowed it from.

Give him his due, he bought a replacement, but he said I wasn’t to look inside it, I was to hand it back and no peeking.

When he was out of the way I read the rest and finished the novel. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, unless it was the heavy smoking.

But that was Louis for you back in those days, always ready with the judgements and the moral tone, but then he mellowed a little in later life and said the school was a nest of hypocrites after it came to light that half of the Reverend Fathers were now standing accused in their retirement of fiddling with little boys.

All the same we had a big row once that set the tone for the remainder of our relationship when Louis told me that as soon as he got the chance he was going to move abroad and head for another country so as to get away from me. And that was just what he did – though whether I was the prime mover in this or just another incidental annoyance he wanted to get away from I’m unsure. I suspect the latter and bear no hard feelings because if he was pleased to go, I was also relieved he was gone, as it meant I could read my books in peace without the censor looking over my shoulder.

The first place Louis went to was Canada. He got his chemistry degree and then went to Alberta to study for an MSc and teach undergraduates. He met a girl there called Chancelle who had a brain the size of his or maybe even bigger and they both studied chemistry and had a lot of sex, according to Louis, and no doubt some intellectual conversations afterwards. They soon moved in together.

Chancelle was French Canadian and her family supported a free and separate Quebec. They wouldn’t speak English to you and made out that they didn’t know any, though they did and spoke it like natives when people weren’t looking. Louis had to learn some French or they’d have left him out of all the conversations. He got quite fluent as far as I know, though he spoke it with a Canadian accent.

But things went to pot after a few years. Louis got his degree and went to work for a mining company out in the sticks. Chancelle got more deeply involved in French Canadian politics and she and Louis only saw each other at weekends. She began an affair with another French Canadian who was also active on the political front (and, no doubt, the sexual one) and spoke better French than Louis did.

Louis got disillusioned and disgusted and came back home. Like most academically-inclined people who don’t know what to do with themselves, he decided to return to university. So he studied for an engineering diploma this time, and when he got it, he moved up north and worked in a straight and proper job for a while, but he got disillusioned and disgusted, as they didn’t know how to run a business and there was too much politics and the senior management were wankers.

So he took his savings and bought a narrow boat and sailed it down the canal and moored it in the harbour half a mile from the flat I lived in with a woman I had fallen in love with, on account – amongst other things – of her Scottish accent. The trouble was she was an artist, and her friends were artists, and Louis lived on a boat now, and he got into craft and furniture making and rented a small workshop by the docks. So everyone was a bohemian apart from me, and I had to get up on Monday mornings and go to work, as I was the one paying the rent.

This narrow boat was the first of Louis’ wrecks. It needed so much work done to it, it would have been easier to start from scratch and build a new one. It had once been a fire boat on the Birmingham canal. Its engine was situated in the middle of the boat, instead of one of the ends, which is more usual, and it had two drive shafts, so that the boat could go in either direction without the need to turn it around – which can be difficult in a narrow canal when you’re in a hurry to put out a fire.

There was no comfort in that boat at all, just a couple of hard bunks and a stove to cook beans on.

‘It’s a doer-upper,’ Louis told me. ‘What do you think?’

‘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?’