Home Comforts

Was a bit of DIY going to make a difference to how I felt about this house?

DRIFTING round Tile World, I spotted a paleblue tile featuring a leaping dolphin in the centre. It was just what I wanted for the bathroom.

I picked one up.

“Do you need help?” an eager salesman asked.

Before I could reply, he’d beckoned over a colleague.

“Jeff, could you help this lady, please? I’m due to go on my break.”

As his colleague approached with slow deliberation, wearing a frozen smile to match my own, I could sense his mind shifting through the gears, wondering what to say to me.

We stood facing each other until the other salesman left.

“Jeff.” I nodded, grasping the nettle first.

He looked relieved, if still tense.

“Linda,” he replied, leaning heavily on his favoured left side. “How are things?”

“Things are fine. Fine and dandy. Couldn’t be dandier.” I willed myself to stop talking. “So, do you work here now?”

I wanted to make it clear I hadn’t known he worked here.

Jeff nodded.

“It uses my knowledge base. And it’s near . . . home.” He hesitated over the word, as if it could only be cemented into a sentence with fine grouting.

Actually, that was an apt simile.

He used to be a professional plasterer and cornicing craftsman (also skilled at tiling and other mysterious DIY things).

Since his accident, he’d had persistent vertigo and other problems, and could no longer scale ladders or carry stacks of tiles.

“I see you’re interested in these tiles with the dolphin in the centre,” he went on.

As he started to tell me about the tiles, I wondered when he’d ask to come and measure the bathroom, or if he’d offer to send someone else round.

I didn’t think I could cope with Jeff gazing round my loo, pencil tucked behind one ear, while I stood there having flashbacks to him emerging from the bathroom doorway in a cloud of steam and expensive cologne.

Anyway, I’d since got rid of the roll-top bath, among a few other cosmetic changes I’d made to what was once our home together.

When we’d divorced and I’d taken over the mortgage, I’d considered selling up, only to remember what else I’d be leaving behind.

It turned out I wasn’t ready. Not yet.

The bathroom tiles, however, needed a long overdue overhaul.

They’d been on Jeff’s to-do list before his accident.

We’d gaze at the oldfashioned tiles already there, garish with mauve flowers, and agree that they had to go.

In the end, Jeff went first. In Tile World, he was still talking about offering me a great deal on the dolphin tiles, turning them over in fingers that had been in plaster for weeks after the accident.

Sitting at his hospital bedside, I’d made the requisite jokes about a plasterer who’d ended up in plaster.

He’d fractured the base of his spine, too, when he fell off a scaffolding platform at work.

I hadn’t made jokes about that.

Now I listened carefully to his tile spiel, only to realise that I was tuning into the sound of his voice rather than to what he was actually saying.

I was so used to hearing that voice raised in frustration at a slow-witted referee, or teasing me about not eating the nut cluster in the bottom of the chocolate box.

We’d been going steady for three years before we married, and our marriage had lasted another three.

“Still interested?” he asked, tilting his salesman’s smile at me.

“Pat will come round to measure up and give you a full quote.”

My face burned.

“I’ll sleep on it.”

I still saw his mum around town and, until last month, his stepsister Ange had been on my pub quiz team.

It’s inevitable, when you both live in a goldfish bowl. I should really have expected to bump into him before now.

He handed me the tile. “Take it home and make sure it suits. Sometimes you have to see a pattern in its overall context.”

OK. Very Confucian. Think of the pattern of your life in its overall context.

Was Jeff capable of being that subtle?

It struck me that, a whole year and a half after our divorce had been finalised, my intimate knowledge of what made him tick was beginning to fade.

Or perhaps, when we were together, I’d just pigeonholed him without considering his pattern in its overall context.

I took the tile home and tossed it on the worktop. There was no way was I going back to Tile World, however good a deal they offered.

Soon after, I rang Mum.

“I thought you knew Jeff worked in Tile World,” she said apologetically.

“I wish you’d said you were going there. I’d have warned you.”

I said nothing, feeling myself starting to choke up.

Mum is perceptive, though. She can read into my silences.

“Oh, love,” she said now, and I could feel my eyes filling.

Mum thought I should have moved moved on by now.

It was a phrase with multiple layers of meaning.

I found myself agreeing to go for dinner with my parents.

It would be a relief in some way, as long as Mum didn’t mention Amy, Jeff’s girlfriend.

Amy had built up her intimate knowledge of what made Jeff tick during all those hours of physio at the hospital.

It happened, apparently. When two people spend hours together every day, in however professional a capacity, a close bond can form.

Not that they became an item before Jeff and I split properly; Amy always wanted to impress that fact upon me.

But it wasn’t just his bones that had been reset, I’d realised belatedly.

The accident meant that Jeff was no longer the same person inside his own head.

He must have lain in that hospital bed battling demons that he couldn’t discuss with me, no matter how much I’d reassured him.

Only much later did it strike me that he’d regarded me as part of the old life he could no longer have – and that included the house, with its reminders of the person he used to be.

After I’d finished chatting to Mum, I took the dolphin tile into the bathroom just for the sake of it.

I held it up against the mauve flowers. Much better.

But I knew that, even if I found the same tile at a different outlet, whenever I looked at the little leaping dolphin, I’d see Jeff’s finger resting in the centre.

I made a cup of tea, took it into the sitting-room and sat down.

I looked up at his lasting gesture for our house.

He’d made it as a surprise for me.

I hadn’t been allowed into the sitting-room for days until it was finished.

Every time I looked up, my heart flooded with joy – joy and and bittersweet memories.

Now, as always, I traced the pattern of those memories in the shape above me and knew I couldn’t move on from our house quite yet.

One day, though, I’d be ready.

One day, when a little bit of fine grouting had been cemented into the fractures of my heart.

****

“What do you think?” The estate agent, Evan, is waving details at Lucy and

Greg.

“Very realistically priced, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

He opens the bathroom door.

“Lovely – er, period detail.”

All three of them study the hideous mauve flowers in silence.

Evan recovers himself. “A day’s work, replacing those. I’ve a mate in the trade.”

“I like them,” Greg insists.

“They have a certain je ne sais quoi.”

When Evan leaves them to poke around on their own, Lucy turns on her husband. “Je ne sais quoi?” she

whispers.

“I was winding you up.” “It’s odd that the seller left those old tiles there, when everything else is finished to such a high standard.” Lucy touches the highly polished banister rail.

“Perhaps we could ask

Evan to ask her.

“Where has the seller moved to again?” “Cornwall, apparently.” “I wonder what made her move to the other end of the country?”

Greg rests his chin on top of Lucy’s head. Househunting is a necessary trudge through the minutiae (and, too often, the detritus) of strangers’ lives, and Lucy gets sidetracked by dwelling on who was living in the houses before.

While he’s wondering how old the boiler is or testing a creaky floorboard, she’s asking the agent if the sellers were happy here, or standing very still and letting the house’s vibe seep into her.

“Let’s go back to the sitting-room,” he says, taking her hand.

“That’ll make or break it, I think.”

She nods.

They’ve both been putting off a second look, in case the impact won’t be the same second time around.

But as they step inside the room and look up, the effect of the beautiful plaster ceiling rose is just the same.

It spreads out from the centre of the ceiling – almost too big for it – and is spectacular.

Mum thought I should have moved on by now

I looked up at his lasting gesture for our house

Handmade, according to Evan, carved by a master plasterer who also designed it.

He doesn’t know if it predates the current seller. He could ask.

“Now that I look at it again . . .” Lucy twists her head, inspecting the cream curlicues from every angle.

“I think there are initials entwined in the facing petals – see?

“I can’t quite make them out. Maybe an L? And that slightly curlier letter facing it could be a J.”

Greg pretends to squint at the rose, the same way he often tries to follow her gaze and discern dolphins or Donald Trump in cloud formations. “Could be.”

“Do you think they’re the craftsman’s initials, or the initials of a couple who commissioned the rose, carefully interwoven so that only the two people who put them there know for sure they exist?” “Could be.”

Lucy hides a smile. She knows his humouring routine better than he thinks.

Evan bobs his head round the door and looks up.

“Ah, yes, the property’s USP. Not quite in keeping with the rest of the house, perhaps.”

Evan is sweating a bit, trying to second-guess this unpredictable couple.

“I could always get rid of it, if you hate it. I have a mate in the trade –”

“We love it!” Greg and Lucy interrupt simultaneously, and grin at each other.

Whatever the vibe of this particular house, it seems to be speaking to them loud and clear.

Their home – it already feels like that.

They’re ready to move in. ■