Transit(35)

I said a lot of people spent their lives trying to make things last as a way of avoiding asking themselves whether those things were what they really wanted.

‘You don’t really think that,’ Amanda said, with a glimmer of interest in her red-rimmed eyes.

Maybe people run marathons, I said, to exercise their fantasies of running away.

Amanda laughed. The argument with Gavin, she said presently, had happened because he had failed to turn up for the trip to Paris she had arranged for her birthday. They had been all packed and ready to go and Gavin had suddenly announced that he’d forgotten his passport. He’d gone to get it and hadn’t come back. Amanda had sat beside her suitcase as the house grew dark around her. She’d tried repeatedly to reach him on the phone but he hadn’t answered. She couldn’t cancel the tickets and the hotel because it was too late. A week had gone by without her hearing from him. But last night he had appeared on the doorstep with a roll of banknotes and given them to her.

I asked whether she had accepted the money.

‘Of course I did,’ she said, lifting her chin defiantly. ‘I made him pay every last penny.’

He had been very apologetic, she went on. He’d tried to make up some ridiculous story about what had happened but then he admitted that he had panicked about going to Paris and had run away. He was scared of going somewhere like that with her: at her house – the building site – he knew where he was, but the idea of being with her in a foreign city had just made him want to hide. He was nearly fifty, and the only holiday he ever went on was a week in Ireland each summer with the members of his golf club, playing in the rain with a group of men he barely knew. Before he met Amanda, he had grown very close to another woman client, a graphic designer in her thirties whose house he was refurbishing. The affair had gone on for months, the manual work running alongside the tortuous building of emotional tension, the slow trickle of feeling through the dense strata of Gavin’s nature. By the time the house was finished, the woman had lost patience and was no longer interested.

‘That’s where I came in,’ Amanda said. She picked up her cup with its gaudy topping and put it to her lips. ‘Whatever you do,’ she said, ‘don’t have a relationship with your builder.’

The problem was, the more complex he allowed his vision of life to become, the further he removed himself from his own capacity to act. He was left tortured by the possibility he himself had so painfully evolved, of translating himself wholly into the middle-class world of which, until now, he had been the factotum. He was meant to be moving in with her but despite the fact that they’d been talking about it for a year, it hadn’t actually happened. He never said he didn’t want to, or that he had changed his mind. He just didn’t do it. But now, she said, she had given him a date, an actual specific day. If on that day he didn’t move into the house, their relationship was over.

I asked her what day it was, and she told me.

The thing is, she said, I feel sorry for him. He had a brutal childhood, which ended when his father put him out on the street to tout for work at the age of fourteen. Sometimes, she said, she and he will be talking about some aspect of the house and she’ll glimpse in his ideas and inspirations a whole other person, a person he could have been. He had told her once that a builder friend of his had come to Amanda’s house to look at something Gavin had done there. This friend had gone all over the house in silence. At the end he had said to Gavin, you’re doing this for yourself to live in, aren’t you? But when it came to it, Amanda said, he couldn’t make the leap.

I asked where Gavin was living, if he wasn’t living with her.

In Romford, she said, with his sister. He says it’s easier to run his business from there, but I know it’s because he can watch telly and eat a takeaway and no one expects him to talk.

What Gavin did understand was how vulnerable you were when your house was being ripped apart. It’s like being on an operating table, Amanda said: you’ve been opened up and now there are men working in there and you can’t move until they’ve fixed you and sewn you together again. While Amanda was in that state, Gavin was capable of loving her. These days he worked on her house for free, in his spare time. The six projected weeks of building works had become two years and counting, while Gavin went off on other jobs during the day. She understood that this situation had come about through a strange misguided sense of honour, but all the same it was hard not to feel that she had become the butt of some immense practical joke.

There was an element of fantasy, she went on, in the idea of male involvement: even someone like her, someone militantly self-sufficient and practical, someone prepared to roll up her sleeves if she had to, had fallen for the idea of being looked after. Gavin saying he would work for love rather than money had thrilled her and relieved her almost in the way that women used to be thrilled and relieved by a proposal of marriage. But love, she had been made to understand, was ultimately intangible: the thrill was all in her own head. Money would have got the work done: as things stood, she couldn’t see where it would ever end. She couldn’t even remember any more what it was like to live somewhere normal, where the shower worked and the heating came on and you didn’t have to cook on a camping stove or thoroughly remove the dust and dirt from your person in order to leave the house, rather than the other way around. The hardest thing was having to look smart for work: she had gone to meetings with grout in her hair and plaster under her fingernails, and once, without realising, paint all down the back of her suit, after she had leaned against a wet wall for a second on her way out. She went around like that for nearly the whole day before anyone told her.