Chapter 16: The Moulding
At breakfast he asked me whether I wanted the last of the coffee.
I said no, and he took it, and he read a page of something on his phone about a planning inspector.
He said the school extension had gone to appeal.
He said it in the tone of a man who expects to win an appeal.
I said that was good.
He put his cup in the dishwasher, which he always did, and he touched the back of my neck on the way past, which he sometimes did.
Then he went to work.
Nothing.
Not a question, not a joke, not a look at the door frame.
I have thought about what I wanted him to say, and the honest answer is that I wanted him to say, How many can you do?
That is all. Four words.
I would have told him twenty-two and I think I would have cried, and I had not cried in that house once.
The man came at ten past eleven.
I know the time because I was in the boot room with the ironing and I heard the van on the shingle, and the shingle in that yard tells you everything.
He was a joiner from the village, sixty-odd, called Ken, who had done work on the house before and knew where the plug sockets were.
He had a bag, a mitre block, a length of moulding under his arm, and a tub of adhesive.
He said, Morning.
He said, I'm to do the scullery door.
I said, Right.
He said, Ogee. Matching the drawing room, apparently.
Then he stood on my stool, the one from beside the boot rack, and he glued and pinned a strip of ogee moulding along the top of the architrave of the kitchen-to-scullery door.
It took him fifty minutes including the mitres, because he cared about the mitres, and he was right to, they were good.
It is about forty millimetres deep at the deepest and it curves out and down.
The eighteen-millimetre ledge is still there.
It is underneath.
It is simply no longer reachable, because there is now a smooth convex projection in front of it, and there is nothing to hook four fingers over.
You could not hang a coat on it.
That is the point of an ogee.
It is a shape specifically designed to shed anything that lands on it.
I made Ken a cup of tea.
He drank it standing up and told me about his daughter in Leeds.
At one point he tapped the new moulding with a knuckle and said, Funny job, this.
Nice frame as it was.
I said, Yes.
He said, Mr Ashford rang me at half seven this morning.
I said, Did he.
He said, Wanted it done today.
I had a kitchen in Meltham but he was quite keen.
Then he swept up, and he took the stool back to the boot rack himself, and he put it second foot from the wall, which is where it lived, and I stood in that kitchen for a while after the van had gone.
Half past seven in the morning.
He had come down the back stairs at one in the morning, watched me for some part of twenty minutes, gone back to bed, slept beside me, got up, and telephoned a joiner before he ate anything.
Then he had come to breakfast and asked me if I wanted the last of the coffee.
There are people who will read that and think: he was frightened of you.
I have had that suggested to me kindly by more than one person, and it is wrong, and I knew it was wrong within about an hour, standing in that kitchen with the ironing board still up.
A frightened man says something. A frightened man asks.
A frightened man rings his mother, or a friend, or a solicitor, or lies awake.
He rang a joiner at half past seven and chose a profile.
I ran my hand along the new moulding.
The adhesive was still tacky at the ends and there were four pin holes he had not filled yet, and he came back on the Friday to fill them and paint it.
Two coats, in the same white as the rest of the woodwork.
By the weekend you could not have proved it was new unless you knew the house, and nobody in that family looked at door frames.
That night I went down at one in the morning out of pure stubbornness and stood underneath it in the dark and put my hand up.
Nothing. A curve.
My fingers came off it the way water does.
I stood there for about a minute.
Then I put the stool back and went to bed, and I did not do it again for six weeks, and something in me that I had been maintaining for three years began, very quietly, to come apart.