The Handmade House Read online

  In September, Charlie and I met Joyce and Ferhan at their offices to try to resolve the problem of not having enough money.

  ‘We could solve this at a stroke,’ Joyce said, ‘if we got rid of the poured concrete.’

  I stared at her. Ferhan had opened a book and was pointing at pictures of pre-cast concrete blocks. Joyce was talking about render, and about how she’d really wanted to put zinc panels on the house she’d built with Bill but she hadn’t been able to afford it. I swallowed hard and blinked. My mouth had gone slack. My eyes were filling with tears. I was going to cry over Ramesh’s costings, to drip mascara over the white coffee cups and the interesting black tile that Joyce and Ferhan used as a tray.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I muttered thickly, banging down my coffee cup and scraping back my chair.

  In Joyce and Ferhan’s bathroom I blew my nose and stared at myself in the mirror. My eyes were puffy and watery and my face was hectic with red patches. I was like a child in the intensity of my wanting, in the outrage and injustice I felt in not being able to have.

  I couldn’t understand it. Why was I so emotional? I didn’t even like concrete. I’d been against it all the way through. I was the one who was supposed to be ambivalent; I’d been dragged along because everybody else was so insistent. Concrete was risky, difficult, contentious, made people laugh incredulously when I mentioned it. It was against my better judgement. And, it now seemed, it was the essence of the building.

  The truth was that I’d been educating myself, on the sly, making a concerted effort to talk myself into it. In particular, I had applied myself to the work of Tadao Ando, or rather, to pictures of it, because the work itself was all in Japan. And the pictures were certainly very beautiful, showing shafts of light and slivers of shadow on simple walls. Some of the photographs were taken in the mauve light of a summer evening; others inside in the middle of the day with bright sunlight branding stripes on the concrete. In the pictures, what you actually saw was light and shade (things that Tadao Ando has claimed he considers architectural materials). ‘The concrete that I use does not give the impression of solidity and weight,’ he said. ‘My concrete forms a surface, which is homogeneous and light; the surface of the wall becomes abstract; it is transformed into nothing and approaches infinity. The existence of the wall as a substance disappears.’

  Not only did the concrete not look like concrete, it attained an abstract state of non-being, even approaching the condition of infinity. It was hardly there at all. How could concrete like this be threatening, when it was practically absent? It was too busy being metaphysical.

  I’d also discovered that concrete had a history pre-dating tower blocks from which young mothers are tempted to throw themselves. I’d learned that the Romans invented, or discovered, concrete. They quarried a pink, sand-like material from Pozzuoli and combined it with silica and alumina to produce what became known as pozzolanic cement, which they then used in the theatre at Pompeii, in some of the arches of the Colosseum in Rome, and, adapted to include locally quarried materials, in Hadrian’s Wall. The architectural historian Sir John Summerson has called concrete ‘the Romans’ greatest architectural legacy’, which seems a bit unfair on, well, Rome – but it was more respectable than I thought. I splashed water on my face, took a deep breath, went back into the meeting.

  ‘I don’t want to lose the concrete,’ I said mulishly.

  It was difficult, though, to find anything else we might lose, because everything seemed essential. Eventually, reluctantly, we decided to dispense with the shutters and the hard landscaping around the outside of the house. The children’s complicated built-in wardrobes could go, to be replaced, for the time being, with something from Ikea. We discovered that the rooflight over the stairs had been charged twice, which got rid of £2,000; we could fit out the utility room in cheaper materials and also simplify the timber shelving in the sitting room. Finally, turning Charlie’s retractable rooflight over the bath into a non-retractable one would save another couple of thousand – which was hard, because for a long time, the house had been envisaged as an indoor/outdoor eating space with an open-air shower. Then the indoor/outdoor eating space went, and the open-air shower became a shower you could open to the air. And now even that was disappearing; something essential to our original conception had been lost. But it appeared that concrete had become even more essential.

  Altogether, the cuts saved us roughly £20,000, which took us back into budget with roughly £10,000 contingency. That wasn’t really enough, especially as there were still prices to be firmed up, but I didn’t believe the costs anyway. The figures that Ramesh had submitted on his second, room-by-room, estimate had included prices for skirting boards, although there were no skirting boards anywhere in the house, and £400 for ironmongery in the den, which only had one door. And why was he quoting £11,000 for painting, when the walls were concrete? There was something Wonderland-like about the figures. We had no idea how much a rooflight cost.

  Suddenly, the design process stopped feeling like a marginally more sophisticated version of Supermarket Sweep – ‘I’ll have one of those’ – and became hemmed in by sobriety and deadly seriousness. Now we had to take responsibility for what we were snatching off the shelves of Joyce and Ferhan’s architectural emporium, because it was going to cost money. We were forced to cut anything that wasn’t absolutely essential. That meant Charlie’s outdoor bathing arrangements, which had sometimes seemed the main attraction, along with the boys’ tree-house, which had never been designed and hadn’t ever worked its way into the budget anyway. The fantasy part was over.

  Varbud moved on to site on 19 November. We went along to meet them and were introduced first to Ramesh, immaculate in a blazer and roll-neck. ‘And this is Mavji,’ Joyce said (pronounced Maouji), ‘who’s going to be looking after the project.’

  I shook hands with him and said warmly, ‘You must be the site manager we’ve heard so much about.’

  ‘Er, well, no, actually,’ Joyce said. ‘He’s left.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘There was a falling out,’ she said quietly. ‘But,’ she added, ‘as a result we’ve got Mavji, which is much better. We hadn’t even hoped to have him!’

  Mavji, it appeared, would be running the job, although sometimes from the workshop, which didn’t quite seem to make him a site manager. He had played with Ramesh as a boy in Kenya. Still, I liked the look of him: tall, with intelligent eyes behind his glasses. His manner was considered, almost intellectual, with an air of sizing things up, of preferring to think than rush about doing. He chain-smoked, narrowing his eyes through the haze that partly hid him from view, preferring to take a drag or flick some ash rather than commit himself. Both Joyce and Ferhan (obviously we didn’t discuss this at the outset, only later in some hysterical moment when nothing seemed to be happening) thought he was sexy. And he was: mysterious and handsome, cool to the point of appearing only just to be ticking over. A few months later, he was banned from driving for a year for repeated speeding offences, which was funny, really, because I never saw him do anything else fast.

  Mavji, then, was the man who was to set the pace for our project. But we were also introduced to VM, who was going to be in charge of it ‘on a day-to-day basis’. So he was a sort of site manager, I supposed.

  VM was shorter and podgier than Mavji. He wore neat jeans and trainers, drove a silver Mercedes and had a lovely smile and mischievous eyes (once, Ferhan phoned him and asked, ‘Is that VM with the beautiful eyes?’ to which he replied, deadpan, ‘Yes’). But the smile slid out only rarely; like Mavji, he resisted too much intimacy. This may have been in case we asked them to do something they weren’t supposed to do, or somehow disrupted the chain of command, about which they had a strict company policy. But I felt at this first meeting, as I would many times afterwards, that they used their Indianness to close us out. (They had a habit of discussing the work in Gujarati. It used to drive Joyce mad when they did it in front of her and she’d tel
l them they were on no account ever to do it again.)

  Ramesh explained now that they intended to spend the first week clearing the site and get the pilings in during the second. They should be able to get the ground beams finished in a fortnight, and then they’d either pour the slab (the floor, effectively) just before Christmas, or just after.

  I was distracted before Christmas, as I always am. Ned’s birthday falls in December, and there are the carol services and end-of-term performances, the buying of presents and sending them and tree-choosing and turkey-ordering and pudding-and mince pie-making and putting in appearances at parties and filing newspaper copy with a hangover. So I didn’t really register until after Christmas that the ground beams, which Ramesh had explained on 19 November were two weeks away, still appeared to be two weeks away.

  The builders had taken a fortnight off for Christmas as planned. (I later found out that this is when they traditionally built a bit more of Lux’s kitchen.) But on 7 January, when they should have been back at work, Clinton Grobler called from Azman Owens to say that no one from Varbud was on site this week because they were ‘dealing with services’ first.

  Clinton was a South African architect, very precise, who had worked on the construction drawings for our project, in particular on getting services into the building, which demanded absolute accuracy, because once the concrete was in, it couldn’t be hacked up again, and in this building there would be no visible ducting, no skirting boards or cornicing to hide things behind. But Clinton’s attention to detail, so useful in many respects, could sometimes be slightly narcoleptic in conversation. It happened that he called when I was in the middle of some work and I didn’t press him to explain. So it was only afterwards that I started thinking that I didn’t know what ‘dealing with services’ meant, but a week sounded a long time to be doing it.

  Charlie and I started wondering if we should have hired a project manager. We’d seen an episode of Grand Designs in which Kevin kept saying to the couple, ‘Do you feel you should have hired a project manager?’ and they agreed that they should have. Maybe that was our mistake as well? Maybe Azman Owens’s interests weren’t identical to ours, and they were running the project to suit themselves? (Though why they should have an interest in delaying the ground beams for nine weeks was a bit of a mystery.) The site looked chaotic: muddy, littered with blue plastic tape, polystyrene chunks and pink foam. It made me think of First World War trenches, or poisoned patches of ground in Eastern Europe, chaotic and hostile. We didn’t understand what was going on, or not going on, and no one was telling us. We weren’t entirely sure what a project manager did or how you went about finding one, but we felt we were missing out. Unfortunately, a project manager would presumably have been another person wanting a percentage.

  Talking about a project manager was a way of not talking about Charlie’s tax bill, which had finally arrived. We had done little to prepare for it, beyond worrying and clinging to a Micawberish belief that an unexpected large cheque would suddenly arrive on the mat one morning.

  In December, Charlie had spoken to Cora, our accountant, about the possibility of staging the payments. ‘Ooh!’ she had said, sounding frightened. She promised to talk to the Inland Revenue, whose response was best described as extremely negative. The only thing Cora could suggest was that Charlie might write to them himself. So he did, proposing to pay half in January, followed by a series of payments in March, May, June and August (by which time he’d have had another bill, but he boldly proposed that he’d clear that as well. The house was scheduled to be finished at the end of June, meaning that we could sell the one in Hackney and use the capital.)

  The tax office wrote back to say they permitted rescheduling only in the direst circumstances, i.e. bankruptcy. We felt bankrupt; effectively, we were bankrupt. But that wasn’t good enough. A meeting was arranged for Charlie at his tax office in Euston for the first Monday in February.

  That weekend, Charlie was preoccupied with what he was going to say. I was due to fly to New York, also on the Monday, to interview the ancient but kittenish founder of Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley-Brown. I was preoccupied with leaving the family and whether she’d despise me for not having a manicure. We sniped at each other and wished we had a project manager.

  On Monday morning, I spoke to Joyce before I left for the airport. She assured me the ground beams were two weeks away. That would be just the eleven weeks late, then.

  Charlie drove down to Euston, parked the car, and left his bulky file of mortgage and bank statements on the roof while he fed the meter. The wind flipped the file open and tossed the papers into the traffic. They whirled into the path of the stop–start taxis, under the wheels of cars, up side streets where they flapped around trees and slid into the dogshit below. He ran after them, retrieving what he could. But some were whisked away or torn apart under the rumbling tyres of trucks.

  He tried to recover his composure for his meeting but he’d felt like a criminal even before he’d lost half his paperwork.

  Alison Charles was a fierce young woman of West African descent who towered over him and began by announcing that his schedule was out of the question. Charlie gave the little speech he’d been mentally rehearsing all weekend, explaining about how he believed in paying taxes, how he’d paid taxes for twenty years, always previously on time, about the house taking longer than expected, the two mortgages and the £50,000 in personal loans we’d had to take out to tide us through the autumn cash flow crisis…

  Alison Charles’s eyes began to roll. Her manner changed. She stopped treating Charlie like a delinquent and started treating him as a sort of hapless, misguided idiot. She thought for a bit, and then she came up with a schedule of her own, similar to his, except that everything would have to be paid off by May.

  Charlie agreed because he had no choice. She said she’d put it to her superiors.

  We waited and waited. She didn’t phone, which felt like bad news, because by the end of the meeting she’d been on Charlie’s side. Then he got a letter saying the proposal had been rejected. The Inland Revenue expected him to pay the whole amount in two weeks. If he didn’t, they would issue distraint proceedings and come round and seize our property.

  I looked around the house. I wasn’t sure our property was worth that much. They’d have to take everything. I wondered how long it would take for the novelty of eating off the floor to wear off. Three days, I reckoned.

  ‘Oh well,’ I said, trying to look on the bright side, ‘they’ll probably leave our bed.’ The base of our bed was broken; like so much of our life, getting a new one was in abeyance until the house was finished.

  The letter included a slip explaining that the tax offices were about to close for refurbishment. They wouldn’t open for a fortnight. This, rather luckily, meant that in reality we didn’t have two weeks, we had four.

  Towards the end of March we managed to pay another chunk. When the tax office reopened, Charlie sent a letter explaining that he’d now paid off three-quarters of the bill, and it didn’t make sense for the Inland Revenue to take legal proceedings that would prevent him from paying the rest, especially on account of having four children to support, etc. He requested another meeting to discuss paying the outstanding amount.

  We didn’t hear anything for six weeks. Charlie claimed that he felt like the father in The Railway Children, about to be whisked off to prison leaving his family to fend for themselves (although, of course, there’s a crucial difference in that the father in The Railway Children turned out to be innocent). Then someone called Ian Cameron called, several times, leaving what Charlie described as a series of ‘spooky’ answering-machine messages. In reality, these seemed to consist of the words ‘Hello, this is Ian Cameron,’ and a telephone number, but Charlie claimed they made him feel sick. We guessed that Ian Cameron was part of some tough, focused department of the Inland Revenue reserved for hard cases. He had a scarily efficient telephone manner and clearly wasn’t intending to give up. Charlie fin
ally steeled himself to call back. Ian Cameron wanted him to speak at a conference of the senior management of the Inland Revenue. Perhaps he could address them on the subject of innovation?

  Eventually someone did get in touch, a man called Mark Saunders. And he turned out to be the Steve Symonds of the Inland Revenue, according to Charlie (this was the highest praise he could have given anyone at this point in our lives, implying flexibility, intelligence and grace). He suggested that Charlie should think carefully about what he could pay, which was the first time anyone had suggested compromise rather than removal of furniture. Perhaps, we thought tentatively, they were coming round to the idea of charging interest rather than locking us up. Charlie needed to do this over the weekend, he added: if he didn’t call with his proposal on Monday or Tuesday, he’d have to wash his hands of us and our slapdash ways.

  Early on Monday morning, Charlie called and said he’d pay half of what we still owed by the last week in May and the rest by the end of July. Mark Saunders suggested that the pair of them should get together in a month or two to discuss how we were going to manage the new bill that was coming in July.

  A couple of years earlier, we’d had one mortgage and no credit card debt. We’d been the sort of people who limited our dealings in property to borrowing a bit extra on the mortgage to fit a new bathroom. Charlie, as he kept reminding me bitterly, had grown up in a family that regarded the acquisition of debt as evil. And now we were in a right mess. Still, Ramesh had produced a new schedule of works, which – paradoxically – showed us finishing on 3 June. This was three weeks earlier than originally planned, even though Varbud had asked for an extra two weeks for bad weather, which Joyce had granted, and even though we were, at this exact moment, at least thirteen weeks behind. We weren’t going to point out the discrepancy. If we could sell the house in Hackney by midsummer, we would survive.