‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘At least until the divorce proceedings start. Then everyone’s after them for their vote.’
In a way, he went on after a while, he felt his clients sometimes forgot that he was a person: instead he became, in a sense, an extension of their own will. Often they would start asking him to do things, like people used to ask their servants, things that were usually trivial but sometimes were so presumptuous he’d begin to doubt he’d heard right. He’d been expected to walk people’s dogs and collect their dry cleaning, to unblock their toilets and once – he smiled – to take a lady’s boots off her feet, because they were so tight she couldn’t get them off herself. He hadn’t literally been asked – if I would excuse his language – to wipe someone’s arse for them, but he didn’t doubt it was a possibility. Of course, he added, you got that in the army too. Once you put people in a position of power over other people, he said, there’s no knowing what they’ll do. But here the power balance is different, he said, because as much as your clients might hate you and resent you they also need you, for the reason that they don’t know how to do what you do.
‘My grandmother was in service,’ he said, ‘and I remember she used to say that the thing that always amazed her was how much people couldn’t do for themselves. They couldn’t light a fire or boil an egg – they couldn’t even dress themselves. Like children, she said. Though in her case,’ he added, ‘she never even knew what it was to be a child.’
He was acquainted with several builders, he went on, who had reached a position of fundamental disrespect under such circumstances: it could make you a dangerous person, the loss of fellow feeling. Someone like you, he said to me, doesn’t want to be falling into those hands. But there was an indifference, almost an ennui, that was dangerous too and that came from too much realising of other people’s visions and dreams: it was exhausting sometimes, to be held at the fine point of his clients’ obsessions, to be the instrument of their desire while remaining the guardian of possibility. He would get home after a day spent removing a set of brand-new tiles he himself had laid only a few days earlier because the client had decided they were the wrong colour, or after hours constructing a wetroom that was meant to replicate the experience of standing outdoors under a waterfall, and find that he barely had the energy to look after himself or his own affairs. He had removed entire kitchens that he himself would never have been able to afford and thrown them away; he had installed wooden floors of such costliness that the client had stood over him while he did it, telling him to be careful. And then sometimes he’d have clients who had no clue what they wanted, who wanted to be told, as if his years of labour had turned him into some kind of authority. It’s funny, he said, but when someone asks me for my opinion, or asks me how I’d do a place if it was up to me, increasingly I imagine living somewhere completely blank, somewhere where all the angles are straight and the corners squared and where there’s nothing, no colours or features, maybe not even any light. But I don’t usually tell clients that, he said. I wouldn’t want them thinking I didn’t care.
He looked at the chunky watch on his wrist and said he had to be going: he’d left his van parked outside and he knew what the traffic wardens around here were like. I accompanied him out to the street, which was quiet in the grey afternoon. We stood for a moment at the bottom of the steps and looked together at the house, which from the outside was the same as all the other houses in the terrace. They were compact three-storey grey-brick Victorian buildings, each with one set of steps rising to the front door and another going down to the basement. The door to the basement stood directly under the front door, so that the steps formed a tunnel-like space around the entrance, like the mouth to a cave. The houses had bow windows at the raised-ground level that projected slightly out from the building, so that when you stood there you had the feeling of being suspended in space above the street. A woman a few doors away was standing in hers, looking down at us.
‘It doesn’t look so bad from this side, does it?’ the builder said. ‘You’d almost never know.’
He stood there, wheezing, his hands on his hips. He said he’d just had a job cancelled, so if I wanted he could put a couple of guys here straight away. Otherwise we were probably talking about Christmas. He gave me his ballpark figure, which was exactly half what the other builders had quoted. For a while his screwed-up eyes travelled up and down the facade, as though looking for something they might have missed, some sign or clue of what was to come. They settled above the front door, where a curious feature was moulded into the white plaster, a human face. All the houses had them: each face was different, some female and some male; their eyes looked down slightly, as though interrogating the person standing at the threshold. The house next door had a woman with maidenly braids wound elaborately around her head; mine had a white plaster man, with thick eyebrows and a jutting forehead and a long pointed beard. There was, or so I told myself, something paternalistic and Zeus-like about him. He looked down from above, like the bearded figure of God in a religious painting looking down on the mêlée below.
The builder told me the guys would arrive promptly at eight o’clock on Monday. I should pack away anything I didn’t want ruined. With any luck, we’d set the place to rights in a matter of weeks. He looked down at the basement, where dirty net curtains hung in the squat window. The sound of the dog barking came faintly from inside.
‘There’s no fixing that, though,’ he said.
He asked whether I’d be able to find alternative accommodation at such short notice. The place would be a building site for a while: there would be a lot of dust and mess, especially at the beginning. I said I wasn’t sure what I would do, but my sons could probably go and stay with their father. His screwed-up eyes moved to my face.
‘He lives nearby then, does he?’ he said.
If the children were sorted, he went on, then we could probably manage. Everyone’s anxiety levels would be that much lower. He could leave one of the bedrooms till last: when everything else was finished, I could move into another room while that last room was being done. He opened the door of his van and got in. I saw the cab was full of empty cardboard coffee cups and discarded food packaging and scraps of paper. Like I said, the builder said ruefully, the job involves a lot of driving. Sometimes he was in his van the whole day and ate all three meals there. You end up sitting in your own leavings, he said, shaking his head. He started the engine and shut the door and then wound down the window while he was pulling away.
‘Eight o’clock Monday,’ he said.