All the Hopeful Lovers (5 page)

‘I don’t mind,’ says Laura.

‘Golliwogs! Honestly.’

‘You can’t talk. You got the golliwog badge. We only collected enough golliwogs for one badge and you said you had to have it even though you never ate any of the marmalade.’

‘Nor did you.’

‘You made Mummy buy a jar we didn’t even need.’

‘So I deserved the badge.’

‘Mummy said we were to share it but you never gave me my share.’

‘I was going to, but Anne Duncan stole it.’

‘You gave it to Anne Duncan. You swapped our golliwog for a tube of Refreshers.’

‘My God, don’t you ever forget anything?’

Diana gazes at Laura with a blend of irritation and wonder. Laura herself is amazed at the way the long-distant past has returned. She remembers Diana’s betrayal as if it was yesterday. So typical of Diana: she never really wanted the golliwog badge for herself, she just wanted her sister not to have it. And that’s how she is, Laura thinks. It’s not personal. In her own way she’s as loyal and loving as she knows how to be.

‘You will come tomorrow, won’t you?’

‘Yes. I’ll come.’

‘I’m doing slow-cooked shoulder of lamb.’ Then, with barely a pause, ‘You don’t think Roddy could be having an affair, do you?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. Not Roddy.’

‘I know that’s what men do. But if he was having an affair, why stop talking to me?’

‘Exactly.’

‘No,’ says Diana, comforting herself. ‘I think it must be a breakdown.’

For a simple job the pipe work is quite tricky. The problem is getting the fall for the drain so that it flows freely to the external soil pipe. Everything would be so much easier if the toilet could be placed against the back wall, but the clients want the bath under the window. The tub is to be raised on a 300 millimeter stand so that when you lie in the bath you can see out of the window, over the railway lines and the water meadows to the Downs.

It’s a nice idea, and it presents the plumber, Matt Early, with a nice little challenge, which he appreciates.

‘If it’s impossible,’ Liz says, ‘we’ll do it another way.’

Liz Dickinson is an understanding client. She has a partner called Alan Strachan, and two children, one a Dickinson and one a Strachan. That’s how families are these days.

‘Nothing’s impossible,’ Matt replies. ‘There’s always a way.’

The room in which the new bathroom is to be built is a top back bedroom, with a chimney breast and a small working fireplace. Liz and Alan say they want to keep the fireplace, even though they won’t use it. The door is in the wall that faces the fireplace. This leaves only the inside wall for the wash basin and the toilet, which means a three metre pipe run to the drains.

Matt has been pondering the problem in silence. He’s a big man, just entering his fortieth year; a man of few words. When he meets a client with a view to taking on a job he lets them do the talking, nodding from time to time to show he’s listening, his eyes fixed on the ground. A gentle giant, people say, because people know nothing. They think because you don’t say much you go about your life like a dumb animal, a horse, maybe, content with your lot. Who knows what goes on inside horses? Rage, perhaps, that they have to haul carts heavy with goods not their own. A passion for liberty, thwarted by the barred gates and the electric fences that hem them round. Why should animals be presumed to be humble?

Matt listens when others talk, and offers no contribution, because he does not regard his view of things as having any status. He does not have the habit of opinions. But he is not humble. He nurses a deep and steady contempt for shoddy workmanship and processed food, for television game shows and politicians who tell people what they want to hear and newspapers that tell lies and credit cards that enable you to buy what you can’t afford and computers and the Internet. ‘I don’t bother with all that,’ he says.

To be sure of providing a decent flow he needs to steal at least fifty millimetres at one end or the other. He can raise the toilet bowl, but this will leave a ridge in the floor in the middle of the room. Therefore the soil pipe must drop fifty millimetres lower at the outer end, which means it will cut through the ceiling of the room below. This is the boy’s bedroom.

Matt pads down the stairs to the floor below, which is the second floor. He makes as little noise as possible, even though he’s alone in the house. In the nature of his work he’s often alone in people’s houses. They give him a key, tell him to let himself in, lock up when he leaves. Everyone works such long hours these days. Alan in London for a meeting on his film script. Liz in Folkestone working on an article about Saga cruises. Matt knows these things because he has heard them speaking to each other. He has no wish to eavesdrop but they forget you’re there, or maybe they think you don’t understand, like a household pet. Down the years he has overheard quarrels and anger, bitterness and tears. Very little joy, very little love. You wonder why people stay together when you hear the ways they set out to hurt each other.

Alan and Liz aren’t so bad. They have a six-year-old boy who Liz spoils because she’s out at work so much. There’s a girl too, who’s away at university. When Alan accuses Liz, saying, ‘Cas loves you best because you always give in to him,’ Liz replies, ‘Well, Alice loves you best, so we’re evens.’ It’s only a kind of joke between them, except that jokes are real.

He enters the second-floor back bedroom and studies the section of the ceiling which will have to be cut away for the soil pipe. It will get in the way of nothing, of course, but the sloping box will look ugly and intrusive. Matt’s aesthetic sense is driven by a strong view on what is fitting. In a corner, between wall and ceiling, a box section would be fitting. In the middle of the ceiling it would be a bodge. And yet it can go nowhere else.

The trick, thinks Matt, is to make a box section in just that position be as necessary to the little boy’s bedroom as it is to the bathroom above. Suppose he evens out the boxing to make it run parallel to the ceiling, and takes it right across from wall to wall: it would then look as if it was a central beam, a part of the structure of the ceiling. But it isn’t a beam. This offends another of Matt’s instinctive rules. You don’t make things pretend to be something they’re not.

I could drop the whole ceiling by fifty millimetres, he thinks. But what do you do with the void? Mice will nest there and eat the plastic coating off the electric cables, and there’ll be the devil’s own job to get back in there and sort it out. You have to think about access. You have to think about the poor sod who gets called out ten years from now to fix a leaking pipe or a fused circuit. It’s a matter of pride; and Matt Early is a proud man.

No point in rushing it. This next stage requires thought. So he goes all the way down to the basement kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee. When he started the job he brought his own Thermos, but Alan said, ‘Use the kitchen.’ Then Alan would hear him going downstairs and would emerge from his study to join him, welcoming a little company while the kettle boiled. A lonely job, sitting all day in front of a computer screen.

One day Alan asked him about his work. Matt thought at first he was wanting a progress report on the new bathroom.

‘No, I mean, does your work interest you?’ Alan said. ‘Does it really interest you?’

No one had ever asked such a question before. Plumbing’s nothing much, Matt knows that. What he usually says is that it suits him. Everyone has to make a living somehow.

‘But would you do it if you weren’t paid to do it?’ says Alan.

There’s a question. A well-made joint in a copper pipe’s a thing of rightness. You can be satisfied by that. A well-designed central heating system with its pumps and its valves, its intersecting runs of pipes and its thermo-switches, is a perfect thing in its way, almost a living creature. The veins, the arteries, the beating heart of a home.

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ he says. ‘But money isn’t everything.’

Matt hates quoting a price for a job. How can you tell how long it will take to solve the hundreds of problems that each new location throws up? It has to be done right. Cut corners and you’ll be found out. Water finds you out. Any weakness in the system, the water will worry at it until it gives way. Water always wins in the end. The job is not to hold the flow back, but to guide it. Persuade it to go the way you want it to go. You can’t say any of that to the clients. So Matt always ends up under-quoting for the job.

‘You’re a fool, Matthew,’ his mother says. ‘You always were. They don’t thank you for it.’

No, they don’t thank him for it. They don’t even know. But he can’t explain to his mother. And she wouldn’t listen. She’s only repeating her lifelong complaint against his father: You let people take advantage of you.

Alan persists.

‘What would you rather be doing, then? If you could.’

There is an answer to this question, but Matt rarely gives it. People never quite know how to respond. It doesn’t fit the role they’ve allotted to him. But Alan is unusually curious.

‘What do you do when you stop work?’

‘This and that,’ says Matt. ‘Go down the shed.’

‘Down the shed?’

‘I’ve got a shed at the bottom of the garden.’

‘And what happens there?’

Matt stares at his feet. Mumbles his answer.

‘Violins.’

‘What?’

‘I work with my violins.’

Alan is astonished. They always are. They think his mind must be too coarse, his hands too callused, to play a violin.

‘You play the violin?’

‘A little.’

‘But that’s wonderful!’

His face expresses genuine delight. That’s when Matt realizes this conversation hasn’t been about him at all. So easy to forget: when people ask you a question about yourself, they’re really asking it of themselves.

Alan is asking himself about his own work. About how much it interests him. About what he would rather be doing.

‘Play the violin! All by yourself! Just for the joy of it!’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, how glorious!’

An odd little conversation, that. Because Matt isn’t much of a talker he doesn’t tell Alan about the rest of his work with violins. Alan is sufficiently gratified already.

‘A plumber who plays the violin! I’ll have to put you in a play.’

A horse that talks. A savage who recites Shakespeare. You could get angry over this sort of thing but what’s the point? He means well. At least he asks.

But I’m not a plumber who plays the violin. I’m a man living my life as best as I can. I love music. I care for a sick mother. I feel trapped. I have long moments of pure joy. I’m lonely. I worry that my eyes aren’t as good as they were. I’m too easily enraged by little things. I’m growing older. I miss my dad.

Alone in the kitchen of someone else’s house Matt drinks his mug of coffee, putting it to his lips while the bitter liquid is still so hot he can only sip. He feels the caffeine buzz in his body. All round the kitchen walls there are drawings done by Caspar, put up by Liz, his proud mother. Drawings of monsters and spiky figures wielding weapons. He’ll be back from school in a little while. Alan hasn’t yet returned, but he promised he’d be home before Cas gets back.

The doorbell rings.

At first Matt does nothing, on the grounds that the caller won’t have come for him. Then he remembers that the caller has come for him. Alan’s sister needs a plumber. Alan arranged for her to drop by this afternoon.

Matt climbs the stairs to the ground floor and opens the front door. A youngish woman is standing outside, caught in the moment of turning to leave. Straight brown hair cut just above the shoulder. A plain bare face. Greenish eyes.

She turns back in some confusion.

‘Oh, you are here,’ she says. ‘I thought maybe I’d missed you.’

‘No,’ says Matt. ‘Come on in.’

As she comes past him into the hall he glances at her again. She’s wearing a dark grey suit that gives her a business-like air, she moves with brisk economy, but the way she casts her eyes down, that he recognizes. She’s nervous.

‘I don’t like to interrupt your work.’

‘No, that’s okay. Alan said you’d be coming round.’

They go into the living room, each aware of the incongruity, as if Matt is the host and she his guest.

‘I’m Meg,’ she says.

‘Right.’

Now that they have reached a destination of sorts, neither sits down. Nor do they look at each other. Unlikely though it seems, Meg is clearly shy in his presence. She is the employer, he the employee. The servant, almost. But she seems not to believe she has the right to command his time.

‘I expect you’re too busy,’ she says.

‘That depends.’

Matt too has his eyes on the floor.

‘It’s the shower,’ she says. ‘It was never much good. Now it doesn’t work at all.’

‘Where is this?’

‘Uckfield. I expect it’s out of your area.’

‘I don’t exactly have an area.’

‘It’s just so hard to find anyone to take on the small jobs. Which I do understand. It can’t really be worth your while. But Alan was telling me how good you are. So I just thought, well, I can ask.’

Matt listens to her low hesitant voice with a growing sensation that is not familiar to him. He looks up and catches a glimpse of uncertainty in her eyes just as she’s looking at him. Both look down again at once, but not before Matt has registered the cause of his confusion.

Meg is beautiful.

Her beauty is not obvious. Not the current style at all, very understated, almost withdrawn. Hers is a severe face, solemn as a saint in a picture. It’s the tremor behind the severity, the modesty you could call it, that makes her beautiful.

‘I’ll be on this job till Christmas,’ he says. ‘Then I’ve got a boiler to put in. When would you be wanting the work done?’

‘Oh, any time, really. No hurry.’

‘Well, then.’

He looks up at her again. She meets his gaze with that uncertain smile. She’s biting her lower lip.

‘I’d best come and take a look,’ he says.

‘Oh, would you? I’d be so grateful.’

She takes out a pen and a business card and writes her home address on the back, and her phone number. He watches the way she frowns as she writes.

‘When do you think you could come?’

‘I could look in tomorrow, end of the morning.’ Tomorrow is Saturday. ‘Twelvish.’

‘Are you sure? That would be perfect.’

She gives him the card, and she goes.

That’s all that happens.

Matt turns the card over.
Meg Strachan, Assistant Marketing Manager, Hartfield Surgical Centre
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