The Handmade House Read online

  He wasn’t much better. He complained that he never had time to think because he was so busy earning money to pay for the house. But since thinking was what he did for a living, that was not a good thing in the long term. We had a row about it. Afterwards he said I gave him courage to do things, which was a nice way of saying that without me he would have been quite well off and not lying awake at nights worrying.

  During the row he said bad-temperedly that he thought that from now on we should ban all conversation about cooker hoods. The trouble was, there were so many cooker hood-type worries that they sort of dribbled out regardless, a Tourette’s Syndrome of domestic appliances. We could pick up conversations about white goods in mid-sentence. I began to wonder seriously if we had any other conversation.

  He was right, though: it couldn’t be healthy to devote so much energy to every tiny detail of our physical surroundings. I longed to get into the house, so that it stopped being a succubus in my brain, had to retreat into houseness and shut up. It wasn’t just that Charlie and I didn’t talk about anything else: neither did anyone else. ‘How’s the house going?’ people would invariably ask. I had forgotten what people discussed over dinner or passed the time of day with in the street when they weren’t building houses. They must have had whole other lives of movies and books and gossip and what was going on in the government. We didn’t; and when the house was finished I couldn’t conceive of us having anything to say.

  I couldn’t understand what was so important about houses anyway. It was what went on in them that mattered. Some old friends of mine came to visit that summer, Americans who’d never met Charlie, and he told them (possibly slightly defensively: looked at through their eyes, the house we were living in must have seemed a tip) that we could be happy anywhere. Which I hoped and believed we could. The house was just a shell. In which case, why had we put ourselves through this?

  Even at this late stage, we were still acquiring consultants. Since the video and DVD were to be located some way from the television, Joyce recommended that we hire someone to tell us what to do with the wiring. So we called in Mark Drax, who was very tall, looked a bit like Kevin’s younger brother, and spoke like a character from an old British war movie. Mark talked about ‘sending in my chaps’, as if we were the bridge at Arnhem, and referred to Joyce as ‘a great girl’, as if she were fifteen and goofy rather than a serious professional architect who was mostly, these days, seen arguing with Varbud.

  Mark offered to design a system for £50 an hour – he thought it would take about four hours – and then we could buy the equipment through him.

  ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re competitive?’ I asked sceptically.

  ‘You can ring up Peter Jones,’ he practically shouted, as if advising a forced march, ‘and if you can buy it there, I’ll refund the difference. I’ll be jolly surprised if you can.’

  He could probably be so confident because the make of equipment he specified was one that Charlie and I had never heard of, and it wasn’t stocked by Peter Jones.

  By October, visible things were starting to happen inside the house. The window frames went in downstairs. The iroko cupboards and shelving transformed the concrete, highlighting its coolness and at the same time warming everything up; you could see that (as Joyce and Ferhan had promised) the space wouldn’t feel cold or forbidding. The rosy wood seemed to glow alongside the grey walls, accentuating their smoothness and implacability, but also making them more approachable, less domineering.

  The first of the stairs were poured, too, in stair-shaped wooden boxes, although when Mavji put them up against the wall they stuck out too far into the hall. There had been, he said, ‘something wrong with the calculation’, which made me wonder whether any other calculations might also have gone awry. In the den, for instance, which, on account of its minuscule size, we had decided to leave open to the hall in one direction and the kitchen in another. Since a third wall was glass, it now wasn’t remotely den-like. We had finally located the world’s smallest sofa to go in there, but that would have to be it for furniture. I no longer wanted to call it the den, which also implied to me that it should be full of soccer moms, when I wasn’t sure there was even room for me. We thought about ‘snug’, but it wasn’t; and Freddie suggested cotching room, but that was both too much of a mouthful and too effortfully hip in a way that would ultimately be embarrassing. I worried that these difficulties over nomenclature indicated that it didn’t really have a function.

  Then there were the bedrooms. ‘We’ve got the beginnings of a bathroom,’ Charlie called out from up the ladder to the second storey, on one of our now increasingly neurotic weekend inspections; then added, ‘Oh my God!’ because the bathroom didn’t appear to leave room for a bed.

  (These weekend inspections were additionally fraught because we had to take Harry and Ned, who were unmoved by our enthusiasm for underfloor heating tubes. One or other of them would try to impale themselves on something spiky or fall from a great height while we were distracted by room size.)

  Shortly afterwards, Joyce and Ferhan announced that they’d decided to turn our bed around. They insisted that their work on the bathroom had given them a chance to rethink the whole master bedroom space, and seemed quite offended when I suggested that there might be an ulterior motive. I remained convinced that it was because if they’d left the bed where it was, we wouldn’t have got round the bottom of it.

  Joyce badgered us to supply bed measurements for the children’s rooms so she could design bedside tables. Charlie ordered some beds from a shop called Purves and Purves and gave her the dimensions. A couple of hours later she rang back to say that Harry’s would stick out into his doorway and Hen’s room would require a smaller desk.

  She suggested I measure out 500 millimetres on the dining table and work out if Hen’s laptop would fit on it.

  I didn’t bother. I thought I owed Hen space at least for a couple of pencils as well as a laptop. She was supposed to be doing a degree. We decided to get the beds made.

  ‘It’s good they’ll fit snugly,’ Joyce said.

  Yeah, I thought; they’ll be like those boxes at railway stations that Japanese men climb into when they’re too pissed to go home.

  Freddie, who had been relatively quiescent for a few weeks under the misapprehension that the children’s bathroom was actually part of his bedroom, was back on form, as that space started filling up with things that were unquestionably bathroom fittings.

  ‘Why are we having an airline toilet?’ he asked bad-temperedly (it was stainless steel, with no visible cistern). ‘Are you planning space-saving reclining beds and meal trays too?’

  Around this time I interviewed a woman who claimed her marriage had broken up because she and her husband converted a barn. This seemed to me entirely understandable. The piece was about stepfamilies, and made me realize that despite the large numbers of stepfamilies in existence, all the imagery of the family – the positive imagery, anyway – is traditional and nuclear. Any representations of blended families that do exist are anguished. Maybe, I thought, we were having all this difficulty fitting comfortably into a house because there was something about us that was against nature? Maybe we were too unwieldy, too hubristic? Stepfamilies have no iconography: what right did we have to think we could make this work?

  With a month to go until we were due to move in, we still had no back wall, no roof, and no glass in any of the windows.

  I cornered Mavji at the site. ‘OK,’ I said seriously, ‘when do you think it will really be ready?’

  Mavji smiled slightly. ‘December.’

  I pointed out that December was a long month, which started quite soon. ‘You’ll have to tell me when in December.’

  ‘Middle,’ he said vaguely.

  I tried to press him, but he just started muttering about the weather.

  Charlie met Ramesh, who was in such a good mood after Diwali that he seemed not to mind that a cheque we’d just written him for £15
,000 had bounced. (To make matters worse, Steve had called that morning to remind us that our £40,000 overdraft expired the following week. ‘The patience of my people is running out,’ he said. Trying not to sound too desperate, Charlie asked if he could at least let us hang on to £20,000 of the overdraft, since in addition to the bouncing £15,000, we were expecting a bill from Varbud for £50,000. We thought we might possibly be able to make up the missing £20,000 with a new loan from Lloyds, now that we’d exchanged contracts.) Anyway, Ramesh promised that the glass was coming on Friday, the joinery the following week. The boiler was about to be fired up, which would get the underfloor heating going, so that the elm floor upstairs could come in the week after next. The bathroom tiling would be done in the next fortnight. So everything was on track. Charlie asked if we’d get in by the 12th and Ramesh answered, ‘No problem, no problem.’

  Not everyone was so optimistic. On 21 November, we had a meeting with Joyce and Ferhan to discuss blinds for the upstairs windows.

  ‘You’re not going to get in for the 12th, are you?’ Ferhan asked with her customary directness. ‘What are you going to do?’

  Joyce, who was speaking to Ramesh on a daily basis, was more influenced by his bland good humour. ‘He doesn’t want you to rent,’ she informed me, after I begged her to get the truth out of him.

  ‘I don’t want us to rent either, but that’s not really the point,’ I said. ‘Is he going to put us up when we’re homeless over Christmas?’

  On the 28th, on one of my anxious daily visits, I spoke to Neven, one of the senior builders.

  ‘Maybe you be in this house for Christmas,’ Neven said brightly.

  ‘But we have to be in by the 12th!’

  Neven looked at me in alarm; clearly, he’d had no idea there’d been any deadline.

  ‘Maybe you get in upstairs,’ he offered kindly, ‘and downstairs not be finished. Kitchen not ready.’

  Why kitchen not ready? What had they been doing all that time they were supposed to have been concentrating on the joinery in the workshop?

  I went home and rang Joyce. ‘Why don’t the labourers know what the date is?’ I yelled. ‘How the hell are they supposed to have a sense of urgency if they don’t realize that in a couple of weeks we’re going to be homeless? How can there be a deadline if no one knows what it is?’

  She passed these concerns on to Ramesh, who called us to say, ‘We don’t tell the men what we’re doing.’

  I got the impression I was at fault. Nobody really liked us talking to the builders. Ramesh’s view was that I wasn’t dealing through the proper channels, so what could I expect?

  Which was all very well, but Neven had to do the work, and presumably was reasonably well placed to assess how long it would take.

  The glass for downstairs had arrived but couldn’t be fitted because the window frames weren’t ready (though given the time Varbud had devoted to the joinery in the workshop, they should by my calculations have been finished sometime last spring). Upstairs, for reasons that I was too exhausted to explore, there still wasn’t any glass – the panes were bigger, or something, and consequently had to come from somewhere else. When I next found Mavji at the site I demanded to know when this upstairs glass was expected.

  ‘At the moment, they are saying [pause] December 10th.’ It was like being told the cheque is in the post.

  I paced the house furiously (or the downstairs; it was still impossible to get to the bedrooms, on account of an absence of stairs), thinking that it was as if Ramesh lived in a parallel universe, in which telling us what we wanted to hear was better than telling us the truth. I insisted to Joyce that I wanted a day-by-day breakdown of what would happen until we got in. Tom Tasou had asked for this for his gates because he said he was being made to look a fool in front of his tenants. I was being made to look a fool in front of myself.

  Ramesh responded that it would be very time-consuming to draw up such a schedule and would cause delays, and it would really be very much more sensible just to get on with the work.

  Until four days before we were due to move, Ramesh continued to insist that we would be in on time. It was increasingly obvious he was talking rubbish. I began looking at houses to rent on short lets. This was a dismal business – most people with nice houses to let want to rent them out for a long time – but I eventually found one in Wapping that was the right size, and not uncomfortable, even if it was in the wrong place. (Being close to the river would be romantic, I thought: the cobbled streets and warehouses, with their alleyways down to the Thames, the dank water and winter fog, the sense of history seeping up the old stone stairways from the river. And all this turned out to be the case, although we never really fitted in. Nobody else seemed to have kids; they all had Porsche convertibles instead. Shopping in the local supermarket was a disorienting business of locating at the very back the few things that didn’t come in the form of ready-meals-for-one.)

  I took the house in Wapping for three weeks, extendable if necessary. Even when he admitted defeat, Ramesh said brightly that we could store all our stuff upstairs in Ivy Grove Lane. I pointed out we had a piano. There was no way we’d get it upstairs: it would have to go into storage. Not for long, though, Ramesh said cheerfully: we’d definitely be in by Christmas.

  The packers arrived in Hackney on 10 December, Ned’s birthday (we had to sing happy birthday at his cousins’ across the road because by then there were no plates or tables). They spread like locusts through the house, although it already felt half dismantled, because I’d given so much away.

  I had hoped to sell a few bits and pieces – a sideboard from Heal’s, a couple of limed oak tables – and so I invited a valuer to have a look and give us a price. I don’t think he was much good, because he accidentally included in a lot of several items an ebonized Arts and Crafts chair and gave it a total price tag of £150. The chair was by Godwin, and worth £800.

  I decided not to bother with him, and to give most of the stuff away to a charity that refurbished old furniture, and employed ex-offenders and drug addicts (who managed to bash the walls with every item they took, and still charged us £15 for our bed, which they said was a disgrace and no one would want). And after that, anything I couldn’t bring myself to give away, or to throw away on the tenth attempt, like the Persian carpets, I put into storage. I skipped around harassing the packers, who, I was convinced, were sending the broken stuff to the new house, Ned’s new birthday presents into storage and none of our clothes to Wapping.

  At the end of the day, I stood in the shell of the house and wondered – even though it looked appallingly scruffy – if we were doing the right thing. All the time we’d been in this house, no one close to us had got sick or died. Harry and Ned had been conceived here. Henrietta and Freddie had effectively grown up here. Their best friends lived across the road in one direction, their cousins in another; there was an easy traffic of children through the houses and gardens. These were the things that mattered to them, not whether their bedside tables were aligned with the bed.

  It was also a stupid time to be leaving Hackney. My mum and Clive’s dad had sat on the steps of Elaine and Clive’s first flat saying bewilderedly to each other that they’d spent all their lives trying to get away from this place, so why would their children want to come back here? But it wasn’t like that any more. For Hen’s generation Hackney was mostly famous for having the highest concentration of artists in Europe; it was a cool place to live.

  There was none of the usual house-moving excitement. Normally, even if emotions are mixed, you can look forward to going somewhere new and presumably more suitable. All we had to look forward to was a meeting with Ramesh to discuss ‘progress’.

  12

  We didn’t have enough money to move in. We couldn’t pay Varbud’s last bill, or Captain Drax for his television; we had no money for the broadband and computer setup or the ridiculously overspecified telephone system.

  The only thing we could think of was to increase our
mortgage to access some cash, which was all very well, but Steve was on his way out of Barclays on a redundancy package and already on gardening leave. He advised us (we could still – just – get hold of him: he had hung on, for a couple of weeks, to his company mobile) to contact Barclays directly – he was sure the money shouldn’t be a problem – but to come back to him if we had any difficulties.

  The bank turned us down.

  Charlie and I paced by the river in Wapping, adrift in yuppieland, frightened. It now seemed perfectly possible that we’d come all this way and we still weren’t going to make it. Despite not actually having been able to afford it, of having no idea what we were taking on, we’d built a house. But possibly one that now, at the very end, we wouldn’t be allowed to have.

  From the outset – overbidding for the land when we had no prospect of laying our hands on the money – the whole thing had only been possible because of Steve: his gambling instinct, or his judgement of us, or whatever it was had carried us through. The whole venture had been an act of faith, not of calculation. And now he was gone, and people had started calculating.

  Charlie’s mobile rang. It was Steve, from France, where he was helping a mate of his do up a flat. We stood by the river, Charlie leaning against a parapet, me up against him staring into the swirling brown water, while Steve offered to do what he could. But this seemed much less reassuring than at any point in the past. He didn’t even work there any more.

  We struggled towards Christmas. The house in Wapping was old and interesting, but suffused, as in the manner of devil possession, with a terrible drains smell. I’d noticed this when I’d been shown around, but had dismissed it as something vaguely to do with the estate agent. The smell was almost unbearable in our bathroom, hung like fog in the bedroom, and kept sneaking down the stairs to the kitchen. It took ages to get something done about it: we told the estate agent, who told the landlord, who had to organize a plumber, who came but said he needed a part that was difficult to source, plus it was winter and Christmas and he was exceptionally busy…