The boat was called Marigold, and every third spring her name needed doing again.

Alan did it on a still day, because you could not letter in a wind, and a still day on that coast in April had to be caught. This one had come on a Wednesday. The sea in the harbour lay like a plate. The gulls were sitting down.

The boat was up on the hard, on her blocks, where she had been all winter, and the stern faced the sun. Alan had sanded the old letters back on Monday and put the ground colour on Tuesday, a dark blue that was nearly black, and now the name had to go on top of it in cream. Not white. White was too much. Cream, the same tin, the same maker, every time.

He had the pot open on an upturned crate. He had the brush, a long-haired sable, thin as a pencil, that he used for nothing else and kept wrapped in cloth in a kitchen drawer where Jean pretended not to know about it. He had the letters marked out in chalk, faint, and a stick to rest his wrist on, and a low stool, and there was nothing else that he needed.

He sat.

The first letter is always the M. It is the hardest and it is best got out of the way. He loaded the brush, and wiped it, and loaded it again, and put the tip of it to the blue, and drew the stroke down. The paint went on thick and smooth and the edge of it was straight, and he breathed out.

Lettering a boat is slow work. Each stroke has to be pulled in one go, with the wrist on the stick and the whole arm moving, and if you stop halfway the paint will tell everybody about it for three years. So you do not stop. You go from the top of the letter to the bottom and lift, and then you load the brush and do the next one.

M. A. R.

Jean came down at about eleven with a flask and two cups and sat on the crate beside the paint pot without saying anything, which was the arrangement. She poured. She put his on the ground by his foot where he could reach it. She drank hers and looked at the harbour.

I. G.

“Straight,” she said.

“It’s the stick,” said Alan.

“It’s not the stick.”

He did not argue. He drank his tea, half of it, and put the cup down, and loaded the brush.

O. L. D.

When the last stroke of the D was pulled he sat back on the stool with the brush held up and away from everything, and looked at it. Marigold. In cream, on blue, on the stern of a boat that had been his father’s and was his, in letters a little rounder at the O than a signwriter would have made them, because that was how his father had made them and Alan had never seen a reason to change it.

“There,” he said.

Jean looked at it for a while.

“There,” she agreed.

He cleaned the brush in the little jar of spirit, slowly, working the cream out of the hairs until they ran clear, and dried it, and wrapped it, and put it in his pocket for the drawer. He put the lid on the tin and tapped it round with the handle of a screwdriver.

The paint would take until the morning to go off. Marigold would sit on her blocks with her name wet and the sun going round her, and by the time the tide came up to the hard on Friday it would be hard and bright and ready.

They walked back up along the harbour wall with the flask. The gulls were still sitting down. Out past the wall the sea lay flat and shining all the way to the edge, and nothing on it was in a hurry, and neither were they.

Behind them, on the hard, on the stern of the boat, in cream on blue, in the still air, the name dried slowly in the sun.