The Handmade House Read online

  Obviously, we were nowhere near having planning permission. We hadn’t even briefed the architects. We hadn’t even appointed them. There were no designs; no one knew how big the house would have to be, or how many rooms it would have, or what materials it would be made of, or what style it should be. It was less than a figment of our imagination.

  ‘That means,’ I said, trying to get it straight in my head, ‘that we’ve just offered to buy the land with £650,000 that we don’t have?’

  ‘Right. At the moment we don’t have it.’

  ‘So where are we going to get it from? Peter’s already spoken to those other companies, the Northern Rock/Halifax people.’

  ‘He’s talking about a bridging loan, to take us up to planning permission.’

  ‘Could we manage that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve got to go, my flight’s being called.’

  ‘Oh well, maybe we’ll be outbid.’

  An hour later, the estate agent called to say our bid had come out top – ‘Not by much,’ she added consolingly, but then presumably that’s what they always say: if you realized you were paying £100,000 over the market rate you might back down. We were the proud owners of a patch of overgrown weeds and an ash tree with a preservation order on it – or we could be, if only we could magic up the money to pay for it.

  In fact, of course, we were no nearer to owning it than we had been before we realized it existed.

  ‘Now, did we explain to you,’ the estate agent inquired smoothly, ‘that it’s a condition of the sale that you exchange and complete on the same day? And the vendors want the whole deal – the house behind, and the land – to go through at the same time? And they want it done within a fortnight, or the deal’s off?’

  ‘That’s, like, a fortnight from now?’

  ‘Exactly. A fortnight from now.’

  No, they had not explained this. This was actually the first we’d heard of it. This development only confirmed my paranoid suspicion that they’d wanted someone else to have it and now, unable to refuse our massive, oversized bid, they were laying landmines in our path. Not that we needed landmines: we were perfectly capable of blowing ourselves up. When Charlie next called, now from Chicago, he revealed that Peter’s bridging loan would cost us £6,000 a month. That was £6,000 a month that wouldn’t actually be spent on anything – not repaying the capital or building a house, just the privilege of having the loan.

  Not only had the existing planning permission not helped; it had caused us problems. There was planning consent for two developer’s houses; therefore we must be developers. The only sort of bridging loan we could have was a commercial one. Even Peter dropped his gung-ho act to acknowledge that, actually, this wasn’t the sort of loan that a couple with no real capital, four kids and erratic incomes should really be taking on. His, and our, high-wire act was over. So we might as well have had six months to exchange and complete. We’d made the bid without the money to pay for it, and he’d exhausted his options. It only heightened the absurdity that in reality we had a mere two weeks, for most of which Charlie would be in Chicago.

  Over the next few days, when Charlie wasn’t out promoting his book, he was sitting in his hotel room adding up figures – our savings, the mortgage advance from Lloyds – in a grim effort to make them somehow come out differently. He admitted subsequently that he was a bit blasé during this period, but he says he never doubted that we’d find the money. He was faintly surprised when I said to him down the phone line from London that I admired his determination but I just didn’t think we were going to be able to do this. (Translated out of loving-married-people speak this reads as something like, ‘Why are you being such a time-wasting prat?’)

  In a sense, of course, he was right: we’d already accomplished the most extraordinary and difficult thing – we’d found a plot, exactly where we’d have chosen to live, and secured it. Compared to that, getting a loan was a commonplace, everyday experience. In another sense, of course, the land had fallen into our laps through no effort of our own and was not an accomplishment at all. And the everyday, commonplace experience of getting a loan was not coming to pass for the very good reasons that we weren’t a good risk, the land wasn’t a good risk, and we might well be deluded about the prospects of planning permission.

  All Peter could now suggest was that we might be able to raise a bridging loan through Lloyds, on the basis of a mortgage offer from Barclays subject to planning permission. We could certainly get a letter of intent from Barclays saying that they were prepared to lend us the money to buy the land eventually, once we had a design for a house and permission to put it there; that they’d gone through the full costings and judged us a decent risk – which, he said, might be a ‘comfort’ to Lloyds.

  But it wasn’t. Lloyds weren’t comforted, weren’t interested in the least. We were stuck.

  Except. Except, except …

  My sister Elaine had no mortgage. This enviable state of affairs had arisen because, in the early 1990s, she’d been involved in setting up and running a television production company which was subsequently sold, and she and her husband Clive had invested the proceeds in owning their house outright. And with typical generosity, which all the same stunned even me, since I am inclined to have a haughty older-sister-taking-for-granted approach to her, they offered to make the deeds over to us, so that we could borrow against it.

  She suggested I call our bank manager. We have the same one, because we both bank at the branch of Barclays where our father’s (and later, when he died, our mother’s) office audio equipment business had had its account – always, this being my parents, respectably in the black. I’d met Steve Symonds only once, briefly – we had nothing to discuss, since I had no money – but Elaine knew him reasonably well.

  So I called him. It was necessary for me to do this rather than Charlie, a) because it was my bank and b) because Charlie was in Chicago, but if I could have got out of it, I would have done so. As I have a lot of trouble with numbers, I try to avoid situations where this might be exposed. It’s not that I’m incapable, exactly, just a bit simple. I can see the pleasure in adding up columns of figures to make them agree. (My mother was a comptometer operator as a young woman and, had she been born thirty years later, would probably have been an accountant or computer programmer; for her, a column of figures tallying with another column of figures is a thing of beauty. Literally, in fact, as she has scrupulously elegant writing, while even my written figures seem to struggle to evade my grip.) I can read a page of text with one figure on it and remember everything about it except the number. I’ll be aware that there was one, just not how many noughts it had on the end. It is a humiliating condition; the only times I’ve ever come close to making mistakes in journalism have been over this difficulty with noughts. Numbers get into my head and start throwing a fog around, and that makes me anxious and distracted, so I don’t concentrate properly and make matters worse. The prospect of having to make a pitch on the basis of numbers was panic-inducing. But there was no one else to do it. And I was guiltily aware that if I hadn’t been so useless and terrified, I would have done it before.

  Steve Symonds was an ordinary bloke, as well as a genius. He’d worked for Barclays for twenty years, since leaving school, and he lived in Chislehurst. These days he worked mainly in the high end of the business, dealing with individuals with incomes over a certain amount – I never found out how much, because I started gabbling as soon as he answered the phone, before he could kindly explain that I ought to talk to someone else. But Steve listened. I suppose, if I am honest, his enthusiasm began when I started talking about Charlie, or more specifically, about Atlas. But the first thing he actually said was, ‘I don’t think we need to involve your sister in this.’ The whole complicated thing with the deeds wouldn’t be necessary.

  The second was, ‘You’ll need to provide heavy-duty paperwork, because I don’t know Charlie’; and the third, ‘You thought you had financing in place, but it’s fall
en through so now you’re back to basics’ (thus neatly demolishing my confected justification for bidding for the land on the basis of fictitious money). He saw through us.

  ‘If I did this,’ he concluded, ‘I’d want to do the whole proposition. You could finance your build with Lloyds, but doing the back end as well might make it easier for me to get the bridging finance.’

  It was probably around this point that I realized he wasn’t just being polite; he was really interested. He could see that it might work, might even make him some money; he got it.

  Already, Steve was thinking about what we’d need: a valuation on the land – he was somewhat surprised we hadn’t seen one before making our offer – and a projected valuation ‘on a build-out basis’, i.e. one that would tell us how much the finished house was likely to be worth. And we should bring along details of our existing life cover, pensions, anything that would help create a complete picture of our finances. We were, he said, only going to get one go.

  He suggested we come and see him as soon as Charlie got back from Chicago, bringing evidence of our income, proof of any more due in the future, our accounts and Charlie’s passport and driving licence to prove he was who he said he was. And then we should put together something about what had persuaded us to buy the land at this price. When I stuttered out my explanation of this he said, ‘Yeah, the more we talk, the trickier it’s becoming.’

  Steve Symonds was recognizable to me; he reminded me of a lot of the boys I’d gone to school with in the East London suburbs – clever, unpretentiously ambitious. I always felt different from those boys when I was an adolescent, although I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was simply that my family was first generation middle class and I had an almost immigrant sense of the possibilities of displacement.

  Friends Reunited means I can look up those boys now and find out, roughly, what they’re doing. Many of them still live locally, or in places remarkably similar to where we grew up. And I still don’t really understand why this makes me despondent. There were plenty of things about the suburbs, those rows of 1930s and 1940s terraces with bay windows and their dutiful, modest nods to Tudor and Arts and Crafts, that I liked and admired. In my head, they are still inextricably linked to the welfare state, to free education and school milk, to Clean Air Acts and more equality than Britain had ever known. None of my father’s family (he had six brothers and sisters) stayed on at school beyond the age of fourteen. They grew up in a tiny house in Hackney Wick, which the authorities later demolished as part of the slum clearance programme. Their children grew up in semis, and went to university.

  So I don’t know why, if I ever had to catch the Tube into town in the rush hour, I was overcome by near-suicidal despair, why I felt I was hurtling along tunnels to blankness. Possibly it was because I was secretly convinced that I was being educated for what my parents would have thought of, already anachronistically, as a nice job, something vaguely secretarial, in the City. East End girls wore smart clothes and got the Tube into the serious, hardworking side of town, where they assisted in the moving of money (not attractive to me, with my numbers problem). I remember, one summer in the sixth form, taking the Tube into town every morning to a temp job as a telephonist-receptionist at a small firm of accountants near Smithfield. I couldn’t believe how empty the work felt, how hollowed out I felt, and I lacked the information to appreciate that there were other jobs in offices that might feel different. (My teachers at school, who had been at university in the late 1960s and early 1970s, were invariably socialists, hippies, or both, and thought working in the City was monstrous, sad, a sell-out, or some combination of all three.) My mood probably wasn’t helped by reading Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward (I fancied myself serious and thought that meant you had to read depressing books) as the train rattled through Leytonstone and Bethnal Green and Liverpool Street, but I decided that if I had to do this for the rest of my life, if I even faced the prospect, I would just give up and die.

  Charlie and I sat in front of Steve, this man I recognized but didn’t, trying to do a good imitation of people who had been through the figures and knew what they were doing. The fact that we hadn’t and didn’t may have counted in our favour: we must have come across, I realize now, as fundamentally cautious about money, people who’d never previously taken any risks, who basically didn’t have much nous. Charlie had grown up in a Methodist-influenced household where capitalism was regarded with a mix of awe and disdain. When he was planning to go to America during his gap year, his father not only organized a meeting for him with the bank manager, but accompanied him to it, as if to provide moral surety, proof of a background of fiscal restraint. Banks, in this world view, were places to which you went not so much for a service as for approval of your lifestyle; the bank manager was a kind of authority-wielding elder. That training in financial circumspection has stayed with Charlie, while my own caution was driven by straightforward fear. I was not financially adept, and had somehow achieved the remarkable feat of living in the Arabian Gulf for five years and returning with no savings. As a couple, Charlie and I had never played about with money, even in a small way, and our interest in cash had never got beyond a strong liking for shopping.

  It helped, no doubt, that the economy was booming. The people at Atlas had suggested to Charlie that he might oversee any broadband ventures they backed in London, leading to an enhanced role and, one assumed, more of this money they seemed to have sloshing about. I was hazy about what broadband was, and Charlie may well have been too, being the sort of person who buys computers for their casings, but there was a good deal of talk about a ‘lab’ (a New Economy word for an office, presumably) to put the broadband ventures in, and he’d already done some preliminary scouting for property in Hoxton. In the event, there were to be no broadband ventures, but no one knew that then.

  As we sat there, bandying figures with Steve, it became clearer and clearer that he thought it was a good idea, which was encouraging, because until then the only people who’d really thought it was workable were us and Elaine and Clive.

  We had a fair amount of paperwork already, prepared in pursuit of earlier attempts at the money. Steve needed confirmation that Charlie really did have the contract with Atlas, so Charlie called them from the meeting and got them to fax over a letter of confirmation. I found this rather unseemly, slightly undignified – I was brought up to believe that discussion of money was vulgar (especially showing people that you needed it) and that you shouldn’t embark on ventures that might be exposing – but then I have no money. This sort of modesty doesn’t get you far.

  Steve kept talking about ‘bringing Charlie into the Barclays environment’. It was Charlie he was interested in, but that was fine by me. Steve said we’d have to get the land valued, which alarmed me because I knew we’d paid way too much for it, but he added blandly that we shouldn’t worry: he’d get his mate Sean on to it. He’d worked with Sean for years. Sean was ‘a practical man, like myself’. Would Sean be aware how much we’d offered? He would.

  Basically, you could see, Steve was on our side. He not only dismissed my tentative suggestion that we could move out of our house in Hackney as soon as we got the mortgage on the land, but said he thought we might want to look at keeping the old house even after the new one was finished so as to rent it out. He had bigger ideas about this than we did.

  Steve thought he could get us a bridging loan of £325,000, which would cost us a lot less than the one we’d been offered before, i.e. would be one that we could actually afford. So with our savings from the Atlas adventure, we’d be left having to increase the mortgage on Malvern Road by £225,000.

  This didn’t look like a problem: when we had put the house on the market months before, we’d sold it inside a week. Almost everyone who’d come to look at it had made an offer; we’d had three competitive bids and the winner would have paid cash, if we hadn’t failed to get the house we were after and pulled out. And that had been months ago: it had probably gone up another 20 g
rand since then.

  After the meeting, Charlie and I hugged each other outside on the pavement, slightly dazed and disbelieving. If it had been left up to me, I would have given up days earlier, weeks earlier, not only because the whole thing looked irrational, impossible, but because I had a hard time getting my head around the idea that I was the sort of person who might build her own house.

  This probably sounds histrionic, not to say unlikely in this age when every other fifteen-year-old expects to win Pop Idol, but I was not fifteen. I was the mother of a fifteen-year-old, and of a different generation, and was definitely brought up not to get above myself. Even when I was in my late thirties and planning to marry Charlie, my mother was at it, anxious to see that I wasn’t getting too cocky. I was planning, I remember, to buy another dress by Catherine Walker (the first one had worked so well) and grumbling about the price, when my mother commented, ‘Well, they are dresses for princesses,’ i.e. not, then, for the likes of you. She meant well, I know; she meant to ease my disappointment at not being able to afford the dress; I’d been over-ambitious in thinking I could have it in the first place. Princess Diana famously wore a lot of Catherine Walker and she and I clearly weren’t the same category of thing. But the subtext was clear, to me, at least: I was not a princess. Not even when I was getting married.

  My parents, I suppose, didn’t want me to get bumptious, or be too disappointed with life – plus, I was a girl and it was incumbent on me to behave with modesty and discretion. Anyway, the upshot of a million subtle messages about not being a princess is that I have sometimes struggled to find a sense of entitlement, which has been all the more troubling for being allied with the arrogance of ambition. So, at the age of nine, I read an article in a children’s annual entitled ‘So, you want to be a journalist?’ and I thought, ‘Yes! yes, I do!’ But I told no one, convinced they’d only reply: ‘How about a nice job in the City? So convenient for the Tube.’