This Is the Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

you—apart from sell it—is to put a proper heating system in. Get a wood-burning stove or something. That little burner 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.”
    â€œWe don’t need any stoves,” Louis told me. “We’re tough.”
    â€œYou 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 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 harbormaster 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 around the harbor 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 vagrant look, which he seemed to so effortlessly accomplish. He ripped his trousers once and walked around 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.
    â€œYou should be able to sew up your own trousers, Louis,” she told him.
    â€œI’m working on it,” he said.
    â€œI thought you were working on your boat,” I told him.
    â€œI’m working on them both.”
    He was actually working on neither. He had a new interest, making occasional tables.
    â€œDoes 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 weren’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’s savings slowly dwindled and he couldn’t be a bohemian anymore. He went and got a manual job assembling generators. It was just a stopgap thing, like so many ofthose jobs were. He stopgapped 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.
    â€œHello,” she said. “I was given this number and I want to speak to Louis.”
    â€œWho’s