The Handmade House Read online

  Working in the house proved impossible: the desk, too heavy to move, was positioned in front of French windows that didn’t shut properly. It snowed that Christmas. And before I could even think about piling on Arctic wear and sitting down at my computer, I had to drive through the festive traffic every morning for two hours. Kerri, who looked after Ned, was also looking after another child near our old house; I didn’t feel I could ask her to trail all the way over to Wapping to spend the day in the cold and the smell. So I drove through the rush hour and the shopping traffic, worrying about when I was going to get any work done.

  On Christmas Eve, I sat down at the rented, too-small kitchen table and sobbed that I was fed up with trying to be perfect. My family stood about eyeing one another nervously, wondering if any of the others had noticed this was what I’d been doing.

  Meanwhile, Ramesh had come up with a new completion date – 21 December – but I was too harassed to contemplate any more upheaval before Christmas; too exhausted from sending out change of addresses in time for 12 December, and Christmas cards, and ordering the turkey and wine, and getting the tree and remembering to rescue the decorations from the packers, and generally carrying off the pretence that we could afford Christmas and afterwards move in and pay the bills.

  Some days before 21 December it became apparent that the house wouldn’t be ready then, or, since Varbud always took two weeks off for Christmas, any time soon. That Boxing Day, we had to content ourselves with going to look at it once more (which this year entailed breaking in: the front door was covered in plastic and nailed shut, because it didn’t have a handle or lock). The stairs were fixed, finally, but there was still no balustrade, so that you could fall sideways into the hall, or off the landing on to the limestone floor below. There were only carcasses for kitchen cupboards and none of the appliances was fixed. A leak appeared to be spreading across the sitting-room ceiling. The shower heads were in the wrong position: Freddie would have had to adopt a hunchback of Notre Dame position to wash his hair.

  (Mavji had promised to move these shower heads a couple of weeks earlier: it was just a question of getting the tiler back, he said brightly, as if tilers were like obedient dogs and came when you called. But I don’t think they can have been, because the shower heads stayed where they were. That it was simple to move them was just another thing they thought we wanted to hear, similar to Ramesh’s instructing Mavji, ‘Do it tomorrow!’ after I’d noted that the children’s bedrooms needed doorstops to protect their wardrobes from being bashed by bedroom-door handles. I mentioned this to Joyce a few days later: she said that this would require her to specify doorstops, so that they could then be ordered. There had never been any question of doing it tomorrow.)

  I extended the lease on the house in Wapping for another fortnight. The new house was starting to feel like a mirage, slipping away the closer we came. All the way through I’d worried about what would happen if one of us died: would the other be able to carry on? Would it be possible, financially, not to? What if both of us died: what would the children do? (Though presumably, with a six- and a two-year-old to look after, a half-finished concrete house would have been reasonably low down everyone’s list of priorities.) Now I worried that some catastrophe would occur at the last minute to stop us ever living there, to serve us right being so pleased that we’d got this far without being sent to prison for non-payment of taxes, for still being married. I don’t know why I wasted quite so much energy on notional disasters since the lack of money was a real one, and quite enough to be going on with. But then Steve called back. He’d sorted it with one of his contacts. We could have the new money on the mortgage, pay the bills, move into the house. It was, he said, the very last thing he was doing at Barclays. ‘We did the whole thing on a wing and a prayer, didn’t we?’ he observed cheerfully. We did; and it had made Barclays an enormous amount of money. If I’d been them, I wouldn’t have let Steve anywhere near a redundancy package; I’d have nailed his feet to the floor.

  On 6 January, I was able to inform Mavji that we planned – finally, definitely, regardless of whether they were ready – to move in on the 10th. It was obvious that the house wouldn’t be anywhere near complete, but I thought I might well go mad if I had to spend another week in Wapping. I had to move on a Friday, because I couldn’t afford to take any more time off work – I’d taken holiday to move the first time and had expected to be able to use the Christmas break to get straight.

  Mavji looked alarmed, but bit his lip in a sign of determination.

  We agreed that certain things needed to be done before then. My own aesthetic contribution to the project had been to choose the lights over the kitchen table. They were hideous; as soon as they went up I realized they’d have to come down. They had too much chrome (any chrome would probably have been too much, but they had a lot) and they looked designerish and affected.

  (My efforts with the lights are probably best glossed over. After hunting for a new pendant to replace the oversized one I’d chosen for the corner of the sitting room, I was forced to acknowledge that the first light that Joyce and Ferhan had shown us – the Louis Poulson design, based on an artichoke – was the best I’d seen. I didn’t know nearly as much as I thought I did about lighting, and what I did know wasn’t tasteful.)

  Meanwhile, in all the confusion over American or English ice dispensers and freezers, nobody, Mavji claimed, had ever told him that the fridge was now 60 centimetres wide rather than 90 centimetres (a size of fridge that, as we had discovered, doesn’t exist anyway). That meant that wires which should have been hidden by the fridge sprouted instead from the middle of the limestone. There was some talk about patching in a piece, then about perhaps waiting for Joyce to come back from Florida and asking her what to do; but I realized this was pointless, because we all knew what Joyce would say. She wouldn’t want any patching in. She’d want a proper limestone tile in that place, the same as everywhere else. And Charlie thought that Varbud ought to lift the tiles and replace them before we moved in, because the job would be so messy.

  I told Mavji that there were three other things critical to our occupation of the house: a balustrade around the void at the top of the stairs, so that people didn’t reach the top step and promptly fall 10 feet back to the ground floor; a working fridge, and a cooker.

  I liked the idea of moving on the 10th. Charlie and I had met on the 10th (of the 10th, in fact) and we’d moved into our previous house on the 10th of August ten years earlier. Unfortunately, the removals men called on the morning of the 10th to say they were double-booked. The boss, they said, was about to ring us to ask if we’d mind moving the following day; they wanted us to refuse, because they didn’t want to do the other job. But the boss was smarter than that: he claimed the van had broken down and he wasn’t sure if he could get a mechanic.

  It was probably just as well because when we got to the house late on the Friday morning, none of the three things had been done. Charlie and I went for a disgruntled lunch at the Vietnamese cultural centre in Hackney and called Ferhan to tell her we were furious: it was impossible; we’d taken the day off work to move and we couldn’t ask the removals men to come in because they’d get to the top of the stairs, then fall and break their necks. (We didn’t bother to mention they weren’t coming anyway.)

  Ferhan did a bit of shouting at Varbud and by the time we got back to the house after our bowls of noodles, Mavji was promising to have the balustrade done by 5 p.m. We decided that since mattresses had been delivered by John Lewis, we might as well retrieve the children from Wapping and spend the night in the house anyway.

  Varbud got the balustrade up at 5.30 and I let the boys in. We had fish and chips and champagne and, a bit later, settled down on our new beds. There was nothing in the house but sheets and a few clothes: it felt perfectly, deliciously minimal. This was, or should have been, the optimum moment – for architects, the handover is often the beginning of the end. ‘Very few of the houses’, Frank Lloyd Wright once c
omplained, ‘were anything but painful to me after the clients moved in and, helplessly, dragged the horrors of the old order along with them.’

  There was, I realized with delight, something liberating about this possession-free space, this quiet minimalism. There was room to breathe, somehow, in the absence of clutter. It was going to be all right after all, this stuffless life. Being here – I woke up to sunshine and an absolute conviction about it – was going to be good. All I needed to make life complete was the piano, the dining table and the books.

  The removals van arrived. In came the piano, the dining table and the books, then box after box after box. What could be in them all? I had no idea we had so many possessions. How could we, after everything I’d thrown away? I’d only been separated from these things for a month, but I’d completely forgotten I had them. Where was I supposed to put them all?

  I was still grappling with these questions a fortnight later, as I worked my way through the unpacking. Charlie lit fires in what would one day be the garden and I intermittently threw the entire contents of boxes on them, too exhausted for yet another trip to Oxfam. (One day, Neven caught me burning a paperback copy of A Child Called It, a book I dislike intensely and had only ever owned because I’d had to write about it. ‘You should not burn books,’ he reproached me gently. ‘We are building a library at home in India. We will take anything.’ I felt distressed: I was aware that burning books, historically, is only a small step up from burning people. All the same, I remained reluctant to inflict Dave Pelzer on Gujarat.)

  Regardless of how many possessions I despatched, there still seemed to be a mountain more. Every moment I wasn’t working or actively feeding people, I was battling with boxes. Maybe this was why I suffered in those first weeks from low-level depression; or maybe it was because after all the waiting, getting into the house was a bit of an anti-climax, just another list of jobs to do to the accompaniment of drilling and sawing and fixing from our now live-in companions, VM and the guys.

  Maybe the depression derived from the realization, now that we were here, of how far we still had to go. Or maybe it was easier, once we were living in what was still basically a building site, to focus on how many things still weren’t right. There was a drainpipe that came down through the kitchen: every time it rained, it sounded as though someone was playing a primitive musical instrument of a stones-inside-a-gourd kind, very loudly. And I worried ceaselessly about stupid, fixable things, about the white walls getting scuffed and why two of the blinds didn’t work.

  Possibly, though, I wasn’t getting enough sleep. The burglar alarm kept going off in the middle of the night. VM had programmed it with Varbud’s telephone number – only, unfortunately, not the one we used. When they did tell me the code, I managed to transpose three of the four digits in my head.

  If I wasn’t stabbing randomly at the burglar alarm panel to stop the screeching sound, I was being kept awake by flapping plastic around the edge of the roof. This plastic couldn’t come down until the shutters went up, but the shutters hadn’t arrived and no one was entirely sure that when they did they’d work anyway. Joyce and Ferhan had wanted simple metal frames supporting horizontal slats, but Brian had said that, at the size, they’d droop at the edges. Together they’d decided to incorporate a diagonal metal strut. A prototype was coming soon, but even Brian still couldn’t be certain it wouldn’t bend. ‘That’s the nightmare about engineering,’ he said cheerfully: ‘it’s often very difficult to prove something, so you have to stick your neck out.’

  Ned kept asking if we were going back to the old house and, sometimes, if we could return to Wapping. He was the only person who had really liked it there.

  ‘The old house was nice,’ he said obstinately over breakfast one morning.

  ‘This house is nice,’ I reassured him. ‘And it’ll be even nicer when it’s finished.’

  He looked at me disconsolately. ‘But it’s just an advert.’

  It didn’t feel like an advert; not, anyway, in the magazine architecture sense. Architects – some of them, anyway – have a habit of working towards the moment of handover as if that were all that mattered; as if the crucial thing were not how people adapt themselves to spaces, and spaces to people. ‘You get work through getting awards, and the award system is based on photographs,’ complains Clare Cooper Marcus, of Berkeley’s Architecture Department. ‘Not use. Not context. Just purely visual photographs taken before people start using the building.’ The British architect Frank Duffy similarly speaks scathingly about ‘the absolutely lifeless picture that takes time out of architecture – the photograph taken the day before move-in. That’s what you get awards for, that’s what you make a career based on. All those lovely but empty stills of uninhabited and uninhabitable spaces have squeezed more life out of architecture than perhaps any other single factor.’

  Any photograph of our house taken the day before move-in would have featured a gang of Gujaratis on a building site. And still, weeks in, it seemed inconceivable that the house would ever be finished, that groups of Varbud operatives wouldn’t be turning up in the morning during breakfast, waving through the windows as they went off for their first Indian tea, that I would ever feel calm.

  In the past, when people had claimed that moving was the third most stressful life experience, I’d thought, yeah, sure, moving is really in the same league as death and divorce. Now I had fungus on my feet and an ulcer on my lip. I’d lost one shoe from a pair I’d bought in New York, a mobile phone I’d only acquired the previous week, and two accounts books with all my figures in them for the last four years.

  I worried about terrorism, and then that I was becoming like my mother, who used to push her pram around Leytonstone thinking apocalyptic thoughts, looking at other people and wondering if they were thinking the same things. Admittedly she was raising children through the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War and she was probably pretty depressed about being at home all the time. But I know how she felt. And I suppose I thought that if I could envisage things, then they might not happen – like an amulet, almost – because it seems to me that it’s the things you don’t think of that mostly happen. I envied Charlie his absence of a sense that life is precarious, and then I felt bemused by it because life is precarious, and if you’ve had one of your parents die young and unexpectedly, how can you not be left with a sense of imminent dissolution?

  It took me about three weeks, but then I stopped being depressed. I drifted through my now very organized house, where the stuff that was worth keeping was put away in cupboards, hidden so tidily behind slabs of iroko that it might as well not have been there. The spaces seemed spacious, breathable, open to the sky. When Charlie had insisted that the house would feel big enough, even though it wasn’t actually very big at all, I hadn’t really believed him. But he was right: there was the impression of room to move. And the sun seemed to shine every day, rather as it had the autumn that Charlie and I met.

  Having other people come to visit helped. Their presence seemed to ratify it as a proper house, a place where I could serve dinner and from which I could send them away again at the end of the evening. It didn’t particularly matter what they thought of it. My friend Robin looked around sceptically and said he could see that it all fitted together, but he was glad he hadn’t had to build a whole house: he’d found it horrifying enough just needing some new taps for the bathroom and realizing there were 176 options. He’d felt alarmed by the degree to which his identity seemed to be caught up in the bathroom tap issue and, for a whole house, he wouldn’t have known where to begin – unless, he added, he were building an ecological house, which would give him a theoretical framework. (He was saying, I think, that he wouldn’t have been ready to sign up to the persistent faith in modernism that our house represented: for him, as a set of principles, it just wasn’t compelling enough.)

  My friend Lindy was more straightforward: she could see the point of it, she said, but she couldn’t have lived in it – too many straight
lines and hard angles.

  Hugo, who was often in London, visited several times in the early weeks, and kept describing it as witty, which I couldn’t understand at all. What did he mean, ‘witty’? Was that a good thing? Witty sounded alarmingly postmodern; jokey, like a gingerbread house. Witty was something you looked for in people and novels, not the place you had to live.

  But most people seemed to like it. (Actually, Hugo loved it too. He just thought it was witty.) And anyway, I didn’t care whether they did or not. At a practical, day-to-day level, it made me happy – sitting on the kitchen bench looking out into what would one day be the courtyard-garden, getting into bed in our sleeping cave of a bedroom, the view from my study along the concrete wall, squirrels rootling around and skipping through the slug garden.

  And we did have a few magazine architecture moments: they just came later. Joyce and Ferhan gave a reception at the house one Wednesday afternoon in March for clients and friends. This proved to be a very good idea of ours (not that this had factored in our initial suggestion) because it imposed a deadline that Joyce and Ferhan were absolutely determined to meet. It meant, for example, that the day before the party, the shutters arrived. (At some point, the original plan to have roof-to-ground shutters along different parts of the façade had shifted to shutters along the entire upper storey.) And, as they went up, the morning of Joyce and Ferhan’s event, they transformed the look and the feel of the house.