Maggie arrives, takes one look at the flood, gives me a hug, and retreats to the shop. She can't do anything either.
I don't like to tell her the horrible thoughts I'm having. If it is the underfloor heating, there'll be months of delay and tens of thousands of pounds worth of cost. The whole floor will have to be dug up, and maybe the oak frame will have to be replaced. And could that be done with the roof on?
CHAPTER 32
LOTTERY WINNER
FALLS OFF YACHT
I have seen Death.
And it is tinned mixed vegetables.
This is how it happened. Last night I watched a report on the Ten O'clock News about care homes for the elderly. It included, as such items usually do, what's known in the TV news business as 'wallpaper', that is video images which are vaguely relevant to what the reporter is saying, but often aren't and can even be distracting. This wallpaper showed a very frail, very old lady who was getting help eating her lunch. On her plate was a collection of small, almost colourless cubes, cylinders and balls. I was puzzled at first as to what they might be. Then I realised. They must have come from a tin labelled MIXED VEGETABLES.
So now I understand the truth. When – decades ahead I hope – I see in front of me a plate with tinned mixed vegetables on it, then I'll know. I'll know that this glorious thing called Life is over.
I think about that this morning as I wander, alone, round our building site. I want the thought of tinned mixed vegetables to help me get this flooding crisis into perspective.
It's drizzling now. But even being outside in the wet is better than standing inside, facing the disaster. And when it starts to rain in that sort of steady, determined way that makes you wonder if you'll ever see blue sky again, I go and sit in the car.
I mull over the varied consolatory aphorisms usually offered in such circumstances. They range from the true-but-useless ('It's not the end of the world') through the syrupy ('In every life a little rain must fall') to the downright fascist ('What hurts you makes you strong').
Maggie would say, 'You've got to be Buddhist about it.' Meaning you can never predict what's going to happen to you. Even a happy event can have disastrous consequences. In order to shoehorn myself into a Buddhist frame of mind, I try to think of an example. Lottery winner falls off back of yacht and drowns. Serves him right, I can't help thinking in a not very Buddhist way. What about the reverse? A disaster can be the prelude to something good, e.g. different man falls down manhole, suffers paralysing injury, but finds five pound note… OK, finds priceless jewels. My guess is he'd rather keep the use of his lower limbs than struggle on eBay to flog a tiara. I'm not doing very well at this.
There's an umbrella in the back of the car, so despite the rain, I decide to get out and go for a walk. At least the weather's not trying to con me into thinking all's right with the world.
As I head across the Square, the downpour suddenly delivers a force of water that wouldn't have been amiss 200 million years ago in the Mesozoic wet period. A gust rips my umbrella heavenward and I'm left holding a piece of conceptual sculpture. I splosh over to the nearest teashop, but there are so many people packed and dripping inside already I can't even get through the door. So I huddle in the porch, and am soon joined by a knee-length anorak with a very sensible hood.
A female voice from within it says, 'Hah, global warming, eh?'
'Yeah,' I reply, not having the enthusiasm to explain the difference between weather and climate. 'Wet, huh?'
Fortunately the anorak seems to think I'm being ironic, gives a little laugh, and asks, 'So how's the house building going?'
'Well, you know. Ups and downs,' I reply, then realising I'm not inviting much chumminess, add, 'Sorry, have we met before?'
'I live down the road from you,' comes the reply. 'And I know who you are.'
'Oh.'
'You're Mr Dress-Shop. There, I think it's easing off. Bye.' And anorak and hood scuttle away before I can pursue the discussion further.
Mr Dress-Shop. That's me. Well, I've been called worse. I'm just debating whether I mind having a bolt on identity, when another deluged refugee hops onto the doorstep beside me.
'Hello Derek.' It's Jenni. She's the editor of Stow Times and a well-known figure around Stow. 'Phuuu,' she shivers, shaking the water off her own fully functioning brolly. 'You going in for a coffee?'
'Standing room only,' I explain.
'I bet there's room upstairs,' she says. 'Let's go and see.' She's right, and with no more than a few smiley 'excuse-me's and the odd 'I'm terribly sorry', we capture a leather sofa by the back window.
She asks about the building work. I give her a down-in-the-mouth summary. She sympathises, and I repay her thoughtfulness by enquiring how Stow Times is doing.
'Brilliantly,' she replies. 'We're now distributed to forty-one villages in the north Cotswolds.'
'What!' My bottom rises in shock from its black leather home. 'How many-one?'
'Forty-one.'
'Good God! That's extraordinary.' I should explain, so you can join in my astonishment, what and who Stow Times and Jenni are. She and her husband moved here eight or nine years ago wanting to join things, but found it near impossible to discover what clubs and societies were available. So they decided to do something about it. They produced a couple of sheets of listings, photocopied them 1,200 times, stapled the results together and personally delivered them around Stow. That's how it started. Stow Times is now a full colour, glossy design, fifty-two page magazine supported by high quality advertising. 'So what's been happening?' I ask. 'I knew you delivered to a couple of villages nearby, but forty-one!'
'Well,' she explains. 'If you think about it, Stow is a focus for thousands of people scattered in little settlements around the nearby countryside. They shop here, some come and work here, they might regularly drink and eat out in Stow. But at the same time they've got things going on in their own villages. So we thought, why not include them too?'
'But some of these villages must be quite a way away.'
'Sure. Some are even outside the county. But we've set up three 'regional editions' you could call them. One for Moreton, one for Bourton and one for Chipping Norton, each with special entries for the villages around them.'
'So how many copies per month?'
'We get pushed through 12,000 letterboxes.'
'Crikey! So how many readers is that?'
'Somewhere between thirty-six and forty-thousand.'
'Forty thousand readers! For Stow Times! But that's more than the number of people who buy The Lady magazine!' I happen to know this because I was recently condemned to leaf through a six-month old edition at the doctors when I'd forgotten my book, saw the circulation figure quoted, and I remember marvelling that there are still thirty thousand families looking for live-in nannies. Jenni beams and raises her eyebrows in confirmation, as I go on, 'Who delivers them all?'
'We've got seventy volunteers.'
'That's a small army,' I say, trying to calm my voice in case my repeated expressions of amazement come over as a slight on my perception of her organisational and editorial abilities rather than mouth-widening admiration. 'Why do they do it?'
'It's a trade-off. I put in their ads for the rural cinema, dog show or village fête and in return they deliver to their road. Oh, and by the way we've got some overseas subscribers now, in Canada and New Zealand. And a woman in Bermuda sends me £100 a year to have Stow Times posted to her.'
'So how do the finances work?'
'It breaks even. The advertising covers the cost of design and printing. But no one else gets paid.'
'Including you?'
'That's right. I just get my petrol expenses.'
'Well, what a success story!'
'Thank you. I think it's important because it helps make people feel a part of the place where they live.' She smiles. 'But I want to do so much more. I want to expand the magazine even further.' She stops for a moment while we both nod to a young couple – all grassy
boots and soggy rucksacks – who are asking if they can share our table. She continues, 'One of the reasons why Stow is such a great place to live is not only because of its rich history, it's also a place with a future. You'll have to forgive me,' she goes on, 'I'm "banner-carrying", as my mother used to say.'
'So, do you reckon Stow's well-prepared for the future?'
'Yes, but we need more. Most of all we need a community centre. Somewhere that locals can hire for meetings, that the youth club could use for instance, and where there could be a museum. Can you believe that Stow – Civil War site, Iron Age fort and all the rest – doesn't have a museum!'
I'm nodding. 'Sure. You're absolutely right.'
She leans back. 'Well, if you'll excuse me, I need to make tracks, rain or no rain.' I thank her for her time, she wishes me lots of luck with The Old Stables, and we squeeze our way back downstairs through the packed wet ranks of coffee and hand-made-chocolate-cake consumers.
Something tells me that one way or another, Maggie's and my future is going to be here in Stow, and that one way or another it's going to be at The Old Stables. Flood or no flood. So I scamper through the rain, round the dog-leg of Church Street and along Fleece Alley before clambering back into the front seat of the car to wait for Mark the plumber.
By the time the wheels of his van shoot a muddy spray of water against my driver's side window, the air is so black that I can hardly make him out heading across the road. With his hoody up and a long piece of lead piping in his hands, he is the Grim Reaper of plumbers.
I scramble out and scuttle after him into the house. There's a further delay because he can't lay his hands on a certain spanner, so has to walk up to Stow Agricultural Services to buy one.
Nik arrives, nods, says nothing and potters round the place for want of anything else to do.
Mark returns and disappears into the boiler room. Nik does a running commentary. Mark is turning the boiler up to maximum, then taking readings at the point the heated water goes into the pipe network, and then where it comes out again. I hover at his shoulder.
'That's not going to speed him up, you know,' says Nik. In other words, it's slowing him down. So I slink away and sit on a stack of blocks where I soon feel the damp seeping up to my backside, and wait. It's fifteen years since I gave up smoking, and for the first time in at least thirteen, I might just have had one if it had been offered.
'Well,' says Mark, emerging at last from the boiler room and throwing back his Reaper's hoody, with nothing but a spanner in his hands, 'there's definitely no loss of pressure.'
'Hhmmhh,' I breathe again. 'So you're saying those little pipes buried under all that concrete screed are in mint condition?'
I study Mark's head for signs of affirmative inclination, and add, trying to encourage in him some sort of smile, however weak, 'Well that's something, isn't it?' Blank. I look over to Nik.
'Yeah, I suppose so,' he says. 'That doesn't help explain it though. We've just got to hope that for some reason this screed's got a lot, a lot of water in it.'
It's at this point I remember what the South African guy who laid it had told me. That he thought the slurry was extra runny at first. I now spill this news to Nik and Mark, my words a sloppy mix of excitement and apprehension.
'Well, that's probably it,' says Nik. 'It would make sense. But anyway, let's forget about what caused it for the minute. What we need to do now is get rid of all this water so it doesn't keep going round in circles. We need lots of heavy-duty dehumidifiers.'
So he goes off in his pickup to find some at the plant hire shop in Bourton-on-the-Water.
Mark hoods up again and trundles off back to wherever he was before, and I'm left alone once more, this time my brain embroidering an elaborate tapestry of solutions.
After thirty minutes of this, Nik's back and I'm helping him lug in a collection of weighty, battered steel boxes. By the time these dehumidifying monsters are all in top gear, the house is juddering with the combined din of eight motors sucking the moisture out of the air and sluicing it into eight knee-high buckets.
Nik and I review where we are over mugs of tea, leaning on the bonnet of his truck. The downpour's stopped.
'With the plaster and the paintwork, there's nothing permanent,' he says. 'They'll just have to be redone. Your heating system's probably fine. And we can only hope the floor will be as well, once it's thoroughly dried out. The oak looks a bit worse for wear right now. But my guess is it'll be OK. It'll just shrink again when it's dried. You might want to call Nigel, see what he reckons.' I nod and drink more tea. 'So really, at the end of the day, you've likely got two problems. Your costs are going to go up, because of stuff that's got to be done again. And you're not going to be able to move in when you thought you were.'
I phone Nigel, who commiserates, but says the oak should be no worse off than if it had been in a torrential thunderstorm, which is what the outside exposed columns and beams will have to put up with anyway. So that's a tick. I think.
I go round to Maggie's shop to give her the tidings.
She comes round from behind her counter and gives me a hug.
'Do you really think it's going to be OK?' she asks.
'Who knows? But it's for sure looking a helluva lot cheerier than it was first thing this morning. We've just got to let Nik and Simon get on with it, and hope there's no permanent damage.'
The shop's quiet, and we stand there speculating for the next half hour on why this has happened, how much it's going to cost us, how much longer it's going to take, but not whether the whole thing is a big mistake after all. I suppose we've invested too much hope and heartache in it to give up on it.
Then Maggie says, 'Maybe, this is a blessing in disguise. For the last few days before we move in, rather than drive some poor friends mad cluttering up their kitchen, or being miserable in a guest-house bedroom, why don't we clear off to the sunshine for a week or so? We'd be at the end of a phone if Nik needed to talk. And I think we might both go nuts unless we escape for a bit.'
Right again.
Like the tail of a comet, lesser setbacks follow in the wake of the main disaster.
When the dehumidifiers start rasping their throats and can find no more than an occasional mouthful to spit into their buckets, Justine comes back. But her water content gauge is the bearer of bad news. She shakes her head. 'Still too high,' she says. 'I don't want to trap any moisture underneath.' So we have to wait again.
Then the guys arrive with the slabs of granite for the kitchen worktops.
'It's wobbling,' says the foreman. I look quizzical. 'The kitchen units haven't been fixed properly.' He doesn't need to explain that sheets of rock weighing 200 kilos each probably need more than the odd 1-inch screw in the base units that will be holding them up. I phone Nik, who says he'll talk to the chippy. I then get a call from the outraged carpenter, who regards the accusation as a slight on his whole profession, and, in effect, condemns the kitchen worktoppers as Johnnie-come-latelies not worthy to lick the sawdust from the trainers of those that walk in the footsteps of Noah, Joseph and all the other great wood-joiners down the ages.
Ten minutes later, he calls back and explains that his apprentice has just confessed to having forgotten to tighten up the screws at the back of the kitchen units. I stop myself asking whether any of us would be here today if apprentices had been left to caulk the Ark without supervision. I settle instead for a disdainful 'Hah!'
When the kitchen bases have been made solid, the guys return to fit the granite. It's so heavy and cumbersome that it takes two men fifteen minutes and a pint of sweat to manoeuvre each of the three pieces into place. I keep out of the way. Then once the chaps are massaging their backs and pouring bottles of water down their throats, I go over to thank them and admire their work.
I shudder.
'I hate to tell you this,' I say, 'but the draining board channels are on the wrong side of the sink.' They take out the plans again, twisting them this way and that as though they're
unfathomable works of modern art. The mistake was in the workshop. The middle piece has been cut wrongly. It'll have to go back, and because of the way they fit together, all three slabs have to come off again. The men's patience is up to Old Testament standards. Did Job come before or after Noah?
Then one sunny Friday morning, Justine pronounces the floor dry, and offers to work with her partner without stopping, through the weekend, to lay the limestone. We heap thanks on her, and a week later, we're able to shake her hand and coo over our long-yearned-for floor.
The effect is dramatic. For the past few weeks, since getting the doors on and the keys in our hands, I've felt a fraud calling this place 'the house'. Now, with the concrete gone, and with the creamy-butter coloured, but rock-hard, faces of the slabs looking up at us, the words 'our home' now sit on my lips without blushing.
My suggestion that we should christen the place by smashing a bottle of Merlot on the floor, thus celebrating its invulnerability to scratch and stain, is rejected by Maggie, who instead shoves me into the car. We've got to finish clearing out Mill Cottage before we head for Birmingham Airport the next morning.
A Horse in the Bathroom Page 26