The Handmade House Read online

  The house, at some level, was an attempt to prove that I could be in control, if only because we would be starting from zero, from a hole in the ground. I wanted to build somewhere we all belonged, felt comfortable, a house from which we were free to go at times and under conditions of our own choosing, and to which, consequently, we were relieved to return.

  I took to visiting the site in the late afternoon, after 4 p.m., by which time the builders had left, and there was no danger of surprising them in some disconcerting tableau. (I once intruded upon two labourers peaceably combing the earth between the trenches into neat patterns.) Later in the day, I could stroll around without disturbing anybody, without feeling that they felt the need to talk to me and to fend me off.

  The broken wall that had originally bordered the site had gone, replaced with metal fencing panels tied together with plastic rope, or clipped at the top with U-shaped pieces of reinforcing steel. It was easy to break in, and I’d scramble across the rutted ground, between bales of the pink insulating material destined for the foundations, and pace between the stands of reinforcement that stuck up to show where the walls would be. I’d try to imagine myself in these rooms, having a conversation with Charlie in the kitchen, doing a jigsaw with Ned on the floor of the den.

  The trouble was that the more the house assumed a shape, the more difficult it was to envisage. Short of erecting a full-size mock-up on the site, it was impossible to grasp exactly what we were building. Charlie said he tended to focus on one or two images, like the concrete wall behind the stairs. I didn’t know which wall he was talking about. I wasn’t aware that there was a concrete wall behind the stairs. Or, he said, a tranquil bedroom that wasn’t full of his work. He was finishing his book, and there must have been twenty or thirty piles of books in our bedroom, none of which could be touched because they were all carefully ordered. Joyce and Ferhan thought it was dreadful that I had to climb over obscure works on futurism to get to my T-shirts, but actually, it was worse for Charlie. He hardly left the room.

  Charlie reported back from the first site meeting I missed (the one I hadn’t actually forgotten). Joyce arrived late: she had bronchitis and shouldn’t really have been there at all. Clinton arrived early and picked a fight with Ramesh about the slow rate of progress, to which Ramesh coolly replied that he was used to working cooperatively rather than confrontationally and on a job like this, there had to be trust. Then he left. Clinton said to Charlie, ‘So we’ll play it his way for the time being,’ as if we had any choice.

  There were a couple of desultory labourers, working with drills (when Charlie demonstrated this, he did it one-handed). Mavji was ‘semi-apologetic’ and explained that the trenches were collapsing because of the rain.

  Still, there were four concrete test panels, which were what had made Joyce get out of bed. And David Bennett had come in from Essex. ‘What was he like?’ I asked excitedly. Charlie said, ‘Exceptionally interested in concrete.’

  I had believed that these panels were being cast to test the colours created by using different types of aggregate. For some reason I persisted in this belief even when Charlie reported that the discussion had entirely focused on the length of time they’d remained in the formwork: the first panel had been left in for one day, the second for two, and so on. The longer they cured, the darker they became.

  Charlie had asked Mavji what would be the effect on the schedule of leaving them for four days; Mavji, he said, ‘seemed nonplussed’, from which Charlie deduced that there was no provision on the timings for leaving the walls in the formwork for four days. Another interpretation might have been that Mavji knew the schedule was a fiction. Anyway, the point seemed irrelevant to me, since we didn’t want dark, four-day concrete, we wanted the palest walls possible.

  I resolved to look at the panels as soon as I could, but in the meantime we were leaving that afternoon for Dublin to see Hugo and Sue, who were now camping in their (very large) eighteenth-century Georgian house in Dun Laoghaire and mulling over architects’ plans to strip out and streamline their interiors. (Sleek, Hugo said, hadn’t really reached middle-class housing in Dublin yet. Perhaps, I thought mutinously, that was because sleek was impractical. I doubted my ability ever to live other than congestedly, unless in a mansion, and we clearly weren’t getting one of those.)

  While we were in Dublin, we visited the city’s latest architectural addition, the extension to the National Gallery of Ireland. ‘Hah, that’s interesting!’ Charlie said knowledgeably, looking at the concrete. ‘Chamfered edges! We’re going to have those. They’re to stop the formwork damaging the panels when you peel it off.’

  I had no idea what he was talking about. I was mainly interested in the colour, which was white.

  But when I went to see our test panels, immediately after the weekend, they were grey. Some were a deeper grey than others, but they were all, unmistakably and incontrovertibly, rather grubby and dark. ‘Well, those won’t do at all,’ I muttered irritably. ‘I’ll have to call Joyce.’ But I couldn’t get hold of her that afternoon, and the following morning, the minutes of the site meeting arrived. ‘Concrete panels approved,’ I read, ‘by AOA, concrete consultant and client.’

  I stomped upstairs to see Charlie. ‘Is this true?’ I waved the piece of paper at him. ‘Did you approve these panels?’

  ‘Huh?’ He looked up from some book about globalization.

  ‘Did you approve them?’

  ‘Er, no… Well, I suppose I might have said, “They look fine.” The lighter two.’

  ‘Oh, this is ridiculous! How can they do this? How can they say, “approved by client” when only half the client was there?’

  I trailed back downstairs and telephoned Joyce. ‘Those panels were never approved!’ I protested. ‘I wanted beige concrete!’

  Beige, Joyce explained patiently, as though to someone of limited comprehension, was not possible. David Bennett had spoken to a number of ready-mix companies and decided to go with one. This was the colour they did.

  ‘So I can have any colour so long as it’s grey? What was the point of all that stuff in David Bennett’s book about different aggregates? Ground-granulated blast-furnace slag cement blah blah? And how come other people can have pale concrete? The concrete in the National Gallery of Ireland is nearly white!’

  ‘That’s a much bigger project,’ Joyce said patiently. ‘If we’d wanted a special colour, we’d have had to get the concrete company to clean out their vats every time. It would be very expensive, plus they might not do it properly and then we’d end up with different colours.’

  Even I could see that different colours would be worse than grey.

  ‘So how did Konditor and Cook get their concrete?’ They’d recently opened a new, Azman Owens-designed shop on Gray’s Inn Road, with a handsome concrete panel beside the door and a concrete counter, both pale.

  ‘They mixed it on site. The quantities were smaller.’

  We had the wrong size of job. It was both too big and too small. If we’d been bigger, we could have had a batching plant on site; if we’d been smaller, we could have made up the concrete in the quantities we needed. But we were planning to pour once or twice a week for two or three months. We couldn’t expect a ready-mix company to set a vat aside for us for all that time.

  ‘So you are saying,’ I asked futilely, ‘that it’s absolutely impossible to look at different colours?’

  ‘It’s not impossible, no. Nothing’s impossible; but there would be time and cost implications.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘The house wouldn’t be finished until Christmas. And we’re paying £62 a cubic metre for this concrete. A different colour would cost more than a hundred.’

  White concrete, David Bennett told me later, would actually have cost a minimum £400 per cubic metre. While I’d been drifting along, imagining I could pick my colour, rather as if off a paint chart, David had interviewed a number of ready-mix concrete companies. He’d weighed up the seniority and ca
libre of the people they put forward to talk to him, the prices they were quoting, the ease of access to the site (it was important not to be too far away; you didn’t want the mixture swilling around in the drum for too long in case it affected the consistency). And he’d decided to go with a company called Hanson because they met all the criteria, he’d worked with them before, and they’d undertaken to send a technician with each load.

  Much later, David told me that there might have been one affordable way of getting a paler concrete. We could have had some blast-furnace slag in place of a proportion of the Portland cement, which is an option that a number of ready-mix companies offer, not least because the blast-furnace slag is 10 per cent cheaper. But, he said, ‘the cement batcher could have made a mistake in the blending and if we were slightly out we could have ended up with a different colour on that load. Hanson were offering us good quality controls and I didn’t want to make it more difficult than it needed to be.’

  This at least, was information. It was more than I’d got so far. I couldn’t believe no one had involved me in the decision, knowing how agitated I was about pale concrete; nor that once it was made, they hadn’t at least explained it to me.

  ‘Besides,’ Joyce said wearily, ‘the concrete is supposed to look like concrete. I don’t actually like the concrete in the National Gallery of Ireland. It looks like plaster.’

  ‘Well,’ I said bad-temperedly, ‘I do.’

  The builders wanted to move Tom Tasou’s gates, since they were still blocking access to our now pegged-out house. Joyce suggested that we should put manual gates up temporarily, since to reinstate the electronic gates and get them working properly would cost upwards of £3,000. We weren’t yet in a position to hang them in their final place – firstly, because they’d be in the way, and secondly, because they were meant to hang off a concrete wall that we still hadn’t built.

  Somewhat surprisingly, Tom Tasou agreed to this proposal, perhaps because he’d finally sold the house at the bottom of the lane, perhaps because the gates had only ever been a means to an end. At least, he agreed to it initially. A week after the manual gates had gone up he rang again. Every single one of the tenants had complained, he said. They wanted compensation. We needed to re-install the electronic gates and we needed to do it soon. Meanwhile, we probably needed to ‘do some PR’.

  Joyce didn’t want to distract the builders from the preparatory and piling work and she was worried, I think, that we could end up having to take the gates down again more than once. So we composed an apologetic letter to our future neighbours explaining that we intended to get the electronic gates working as soon as the pilings were complete and the front wall was cast. We couldn’t say exactly when this would be, but we thought a matter of weeks.

  Days later, we received a solicitor’s letter from the owners of one of the three mews houses, a Mr and Mrs Gregg. Their tenants had threatened to quit and they wanted the gates replaced forthwith. This was written in solicitor-speak, i.e. as if they were about to beat us up.

  We asked Ramesh to quote for putting the electronic gates back, not in their final position, but as far to the other side of the lane as possible, so they wouldn’t be in the way. A month later, he still hadn’t come back to us, but we’d had another solicitor’s letter. The Greggs claimed their tenants had agreed to stay only if their rent was reduced by £50 a week, backdated two months, and they considered us liable.

  Bridget, our solicitor, said she couldn’t see on what basis they could litigate (although she admitted she wasn’t a litigation lawyer and they might well find something). The other tenants didn’t seem to be finding the situation insufferable, she said, and there was no indication that the Greggs couldn’t re-let and maybe get even more money.

  On the other hand, she thought the loss of security and the electronic buzzer system probably did constitute more than ordinary nuisance. I agreed with her here, even though I thought the gates were ugly and pointless – why would you want to keep us out? – plus politically incorrect, in the sense that if everyone in London decided to live in gated communities the city would cease to function. But since there had been gates when the tenants moved in, it seemed to me they should probably have them back.

  If we did decide to settle, Bridget warned, the Greggs couldn’t arbitrarily decide the amount of compensation. And we should be aware that we might set a precedent and end up compensating everyone in the lane.

  Even as Bridget and I were having this conversation, the fax machine clicked, whirred and churned out the quote from Varbud: £4,128, to include automation and intercom. Eagle Security, the company that supplied the technology, would need two to three weeks to schedule the work. I called Varbud and asked Sri, who organized the work, to get it moving as quickly as possible. We also phoned the Greggs (who were much nicer in person than in their alarming solicitor’s letters) and explained that things were finally happening. The automated gates went back up, on temporary fixings, in the middle of April. Two weeks later, all the buzzers broke again.

  In the middle of all this to-ing and fro-ing about the gates, Joyce took us aside and explained that whereas in most houses the load-bearing walls didn’t take long or cost much to build, in ours, because of the concrete, they constituted a large part of the expense. Under the terms of our self-build mortgage, we could only draw down the next payment to Varbud, of £150,000, when the first-floor slab (i.e. the upstairs floor) was finished. But Varbud had already been on site three months. They needed £15,000 now, this week, and another £60,000 in the next fortnight.

  Joyce suggested that she should write a letter for us to present to the Woolwich, so that we could see if they would give us any flexibility. If we’d got the original self-build mortgage from Barclays, the money would have come to us in seven stages, but the Woolwich’s version allowed for the money to be released in five parts, which didn’t happen to relate particularly well to the order in which we were doing things. (We’d had a slug of money upfront, then the subsequent stages were: first-floor slab; dry – which meant the roof on and the windows in; first finish – i.e. electrics and plumbing; and second finish – plastering and painting.) They ought, Joyce said optimistically, to be able to see that their schedule was to some extent arbitrary, and that it wasn’t working here.

  But what if they didn’t? If we couldn’t pay them, would the builders simply stop? And then how would we ever get the money?

  The people at the Woolwich were intransigent. We could have the money when the first-floor slab was poured (as it said in the mortgage agreement, they pointed out testily) and not in dribs and drabs before.

  Steve Symonds was not at work. No one seemed to know when he’d be back, only that it wouldn’t be immediately. He was unwell, was all they’d say. This was a disaster: we’d got used to him soft shoe-shuffling his way through ‘the Barclays environment’ on our behalf, sorting things out. Charlie spoke to someone else at Barclays about the possibility of a bridging loan.

  Only a couple of months earlier, I’d rashly announced in a meeting with Joyce that I’d been thinking over whether the house had had any affect on Charlie’s and my relationship, and (I was probably rather smug here) that I had decided it hadn’t. We hadn’t disagreed about anything (of course, this was easy: we’d just done what Joyce and Ferhan told us); we hadn’t discovered that we had radically different ideas about our future. We still weren’t disagreeing about the house, but now the strain of the money was making us quarrel about all kinds of other small things. Charlie was about to go to Australia, where he was due to give some talks and no doubt meet interesting people. In the few days before he left, we had two fights, the second over the lunch that was supposed to make up for the first.

  Charlie was trying to sort out the bridging finance before he left the country for three weeks; I was fighting off persistent low-level, nagging concern about Hen, who was billeted in a suburb of Guadalajara, sharing a bed with a girl she didn’t know or, it seemed, like. When I muttered about the
appalling organization of her gap year company, Geoff, a friend of mine, said robustly: ‘It’s good for her. Most of the world is like a suburb of Guadalajara,’ which may have been true but somehow wasn’t much of a consolation. She bunked off her job, which wasn’t really a job anyway, and took a week’s side trip to the coast where, she said, there were too many dismal hippies. She met a couple of boys called John and Patrick, with whom she planned to stay at a ranch with some Mexican men and then go on into the jungle. There was a long stretch when I didn’t hear from her and it occurred to me that I didn’t know John and Patrick’s surnames, or if they were, as I believed, students of Spanish at UCL, or if I’d merely made that up in a hopeful moment, or what their itinerary was. Or even where Mexico is, very accurately.

  The day before Charlie left for Queensland, we dashed to a branch of Barclays in the City to sign the papers for something called an executive loan. We’d be able to pay this back, we trusted, when the first tranche of the mortgage came through. It would cost £800, and we swallowed and pretended it didn’t matter, or it wasn’t happening or something, because there was no point in thinking about that now. We were on a ferry in pitching seas, too far out to make it safer to go back than to go on.

  I was fed up with feeling like a small disreputable state whose lines of credit might be withdrawn at any time. The persistent worry about money made me feel exposed, as if I might be caught out – not just at the cashpoint or the supermarket till, but everywhere. When the car broke down in a village in Hampshire and I had to wait in the dark for someone to come out from a garage in Portsmouth to rescue me, I rang Charlie in Australia, even though for him it was the middle of the night. Being stranded in the dark just seemed to confirm my vulnerability: here I was, stuck on the edge of a field with a useless car and, probably, a useless credit card. It was suddenly rather annoying that he was asleep.

  The week before Easter, I crossed the road to look at Elaine’s building project, which was nearly finished. There were ten people working there. Then I drove over to Highbury to look at ours, which had barely started. There were two people working there.