Contact

by Jonathan Buckley

  I told him that I could take the photographs to the police.

  ‘Not sure that would get you very far,’ he said.

  I was saying something else about the photographs when he interrupted. ‘Look,’ he said, his tone peremptory. ‘As soon as she’s back, you tell her. OK?’ I started to make an objection; again he interrupted. ‘As soon as she’s back, you tell her,’ he repeated, like a machine. ‘You tell and then you call me.’

  Aileen came home; I didn’t tell her about Sam.

  10

  Two days later I took the train to Leeds, where we’d opened our third branch the previous year. I was walking down Queen Victoria Street, on my way to the showroom, when I received a call that gave me such a jolt that I can remember the circumstances of it in precise detail: in front of me a middle-aged woman in a navy blue trench coat was having words with a teenaged girl who had just dropped a Starbucks cup on the pavement. The argument was becoming heated as I looked at my phone and saw that it was Aileen who was calling. A Mr Hendy had turned up at the house five minutes ago, she told me. I was steadying myself for the moment of crisis when Aileen went on: ‘He says you asked him to look at the roof. Is that right?’ I apologised; it had slipped my mind, I told her; I asked if I could speak to him.

  A few seconds later I was talking to Sam the jolly workman. ‘Good morning, Mr Pattison. How are you?’ he said. The cheerfulness had a triumphant edge.

  I wanted to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. Instead I said that I was fine, and reminded him that I’d been going to phone him.

  ‘No problem. Absolutely no problem,’ he said, in an effusion of helpfulness. ‘Just driving past. Thought I’d take a look at what we were talking about.’

  ‘And what were we talking about?’ I asked him.

  ‘From down here, I’d say the chimney stack was a bigger priority than the tiles. I mean, you’re right – some of the tiles are dodgy. But your pointing is in a worse state, I’d say. And you said something about a wall in the garden?’

  I was certain I’d never said anything to Sam about the house; he’d taken a look over the side gate, which is how he knew about the wall; perhaps he’d even climbed over and walked around our garden. The turbulence of these thoughts prevented me from replying, but Sam continued, as if in response to something I had said: ‘Yes, sure. OK. Yes, that’s fine. I’ll pop up on the roof for a minute. I’ve got the ladders with me.’

  I started to say something but Sam cut across me, speaking to Aileen. ‘That’s all right with you, Mrs Pattison? Wouldn’t be disturbing you? Be done in ten minutes.’ I heard Aileen say that he could go ahead. Judging by the sound of her voice, they were standing in the kitchen, and the thought of Sam inside the house made me feel nauseous. ‘Right then, Mr Pattison, I’ll talk to you soon. Have a nice day,’ he said, reverting to the strenuous cheeriness with which he’d begun. I told him that I’d give him a call. ‘No need, sir,’ he replied. ‘I’m in the area. I’ll do you a quote and drop it through the letterbox at the end of the week. No trouble. Really, it’s not. See what you think. No obligation. Up to you. Take care now. Have a nice day.’ He handed the phone back to Aileen and I told her I’d speak to her in the evening. I’d be staying in Leeds overnight.

  I waited a couple of hours before ringing Sam – a period of time in which I was in a state of constant and extreme anxiety, at the thought that he might, at this very moment, be telling Aileen his story. His phone was on, but he didn’t answer. I left a message, saying I’d call back in half an hour. Again he didn’t answer, but this time I hung up. Every fifteen minutes I redialled. On the eighth or ninth attempt I spoke to him.

  ‘Nice of you to call,’ he said.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked him.

  ‘Exactly what I was wondering,’ he said. ‘You were going to call as soon as Aileen came home.’

  ‘That’s right. I was going to phone you.’

  ‘Don’t believe you,’ he said, dully, as though I had let him down so many times in the past that this answer had become a routine.

  ‘I said I would phone you and I would have phoned you. If I say I’ll do something, I’ll do it,’ I said, and immediately regretted the pomposity.

  ‘Sure,’ said Sam.

  There was a silence of a few seconds. ‘I’m not happy about you barging in on Aileen. Very unhappy, in fact,’ I went on.

  ‘I didn’t barge in. I knocked and spoke politely. She asked me in. That’s not barging.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have done it. This is a difficult situation. We need to go slowly.’

  ‘I don’t need to do anything,’ he corrected me.

  ‘If what you want is for you and I to have some sort of relationship,’ I answered, ‘then you can’t carry on like this. That is what you want, I assume?’

  ‘And what about you? Is that what you want?’

  ‘My main concern, at the moment, is Aileen.’

  ‘And yourself,’ he added.

  ‘My main concern is Aileen,’ I reiterated.

  ‘She’s very nice,’ said Sam, as though her niceness had been unexpected.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’ I had been making enquiries about DNA testing; this was the only way to clarify the situation, but I was afraid of proposing the idea now that Sam had inveigled his way into the house. There was no knowing how he might react.

  Another short silence was ended by Sam. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to tell her anything. That’s what you should be doing. And you and I should also be getting our story straight.’ The story, he told me, was that he’d been working on a roof a few doors down from North Street; we’d got talking, and I’d mentioned that I had a few bits and pieces that needed doing, and I’d asked him to drop by. ‘Got that?’ he asked.

  ‘Just out of interest,’ I said. ‘How did you know about the garden wall?

  ‘How do you think? Nice place you got there, I have to say. Very nice. Not what I expected, mind you.’

  ‘And what had you expected?’

  ‘Well, it’s quaint, isn’t it? Chocolate-boxy. I’d imagined something less cute. No offence. But I thought you were a bloke for the modern stuff. Wife’s choice was it?’

  ‘Joint choice.’

  ‘Must have cost a packet. Been there long?’

  I suspected that he already knew how long we’d been living there. ‘So why exactly did you drop by?’ I asked.

  ‘You said you’d call. You didn’t. I thought something might have happened to you,’ he answered.

  ‘I appreciate your concern,’ I told him.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he replied.

  I told him I’d be grateful if he didn’t come to the house at the end of the week. ‘I’ll call you,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

  ‘Thing is,’ said Sam, ‘I already promised your wife. She’s expecting me. Friday, eight o’clock. It’s arranged. I wouldn’t want her to think I’m not reliable.’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with being reliable.’

  ‘I’m in your neck of the woods anyway. Two-minute detour. Easy-peasy.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ I said, in a tone that was more of a plea than I’d intended.

  Now he abruptly changed tactics. ‘Look, Dad,’ he said, ‘it’s tough for you, I know. A big adjustment to make. It’s not easy for me, either. Not exactly been open arms from you, has it? Opposite, in fact. But that’s fair enough. I understand. It’s hard for both of us. I think we have to give it some time. A lot of time. To get to know each other, you know?’

  ‘Precisely,’ I said, ‘which is why—’

  ‘OK,’ he jumped in, ‘so I’ll be there. Eight o’clock. On the dot. See you then.’

  I tried to say something more, but he’d cut me off. There was little point in ringing him back – he was determined to come to the house, and there was nothing I could do to dissuade him. There was, however, one good thing about this conversation: he was no longer at our house, and Aileen hadn’t phoned me;
therefore he hadn’t said anything about our alleged relationship. On the other hand, it was always possible that he’d let slip a remark that would have revealed to Aileen that the connection between us wasn’t quite as casual as he’d made out.

  So I wasn’t entirely relaxed when I called her, and it was clear right away that she’d found this episode perplexing. Why hadn’t I said anything about talking to a builder? I said I thought I’d mentioned it. ‘No, you didn’t,’ she said, and she knew she was right. And if I’d thought we needed to get someone in to fix the roof or the wall in the garden, why hadn’t I discussed it with her? We had discussed it, I said. When we bought the house we knew that a few things would require attention soon. ‘True,’ said Aileen, ‘but that’s not the same thing as discussing it. We didn’t agree to go ahead and do something this week.’ This was true, I had to admit. I’d thought we were in agreement that something had to be done sooner rather than later, but I agreed that we hadn’t actually decided together to take action now. It was peculiar enough, she persisted, that I’d not so much as mentioned to her that I’d asked someone to come round and give us an estimate, but it was even odder that I’d asked this man in particular, because as far as she could make out he was a jobbing builder rather than a roofing specialist. ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘I was impressed by the work he’d done, and it’s not as if we’re contemplating having the whole house rebuilt. It’s just a patch here and there. But if you have bad feeling about him’ – Aileen thinks of herself as someone who can sniff out the untrustworthy, and has often been proved right – ‘we can simply not take him on. If you like, I’ll tell him we’d be happier with a specialist. Do you want me to do that?’

  But Aileen did not have a bad feeling about Sam. She was surprised by the way I’d gone about it, and had initially been on her guard when this slightly fierce-looking young man had appeared on the doorstep with no warning, but her subsequent impressions had been favourable. Unlike the plumber who’d recently made a complete hash of fixing the boiler, he’d been very courteous – he’d even offered to remove his boots at the front door. And he’d seemed very professional. The mortar in the chimney had crumbled so badly that he could push a screwdriver between the bricks, he said, and he’d taken a picture of it with his phone, so she could see that he wasn’t exaggerating. Parts of the roof were more delicate than we’d thought (again, he took pictures of cracked and slipped tiles); he recommended that we take action before the winter. There was no danger that the garden wall would collapse imminently (he’d led Aileen to believe that I was worried it might), but we should think about straightening it out within the next year or so. All of these repairs he could do himself, he’d said, but he understood that we might want to approach other builders for an estimate before proceeding. Those were more or less the words he’d used: ‘I understand you may want to approach other builders before proceeding.’ Articulate and pleasant and thorough and not at all pushy – he’d made a good start with Aileen. ‘But I just wish you’d told me,’ she said.

  ‘I’m getting forgetful,’ I apologised. The excuse was plausible and was accepted; my errors of absent-mindedness – mislaying of keys or a book or a letter – were becoming quite frequent.

  11

  At eight o’clock on the Friday morning Sam arrived, precisely on the hour. He’d made something of an effort to smarten himself up: the sweatshirt seemed new and the jeans looked as if they’d been washed very recently, leaving only a few pale splashes of paint. Whenever I’d seen him previously he’d had a day or two’s growth of stubble, but this morning he was clean-shaven. The hair had been washed too – there were no dots of plaster in it – and a pungent whiff of antiperspirant came off him. He shook our hands with a hand that had seen the nailbrush and clippers that very morning.

  From a new manila folder he took an estimate for the various jobs he’d discussed with Aileen and handed it to her. His attention was directed chiefly at her from the outset, as if he believed that it was Aileen he needed to impress in order to secure the work. We placed the piece of paper on the kitchen table and read the estimate together. Headed with the rubber-stamped words ‘Sam Hendy – Builder & Decorator’, it was written in block capitals on an A4 sheet of good-quality paper, had a misspelt word on nearly every line, and valued his labour at considerably below the market rate. ‘This is very reasonable,’ said Aileen, at which Sam, encouraged, opened the folder again and slid onto the table a yellow plastic envelope, which contained testimonials from satisfied clients, plus photos of garden paths, expanses of roof, various lengths of handsome brickwork, and a fish-pond. The testimonials, all hand-written and grammatically correct and free of spelling errors, seemed to be genuine.

  ‘May I?’ asked Sam, crouching at Aileen’s side to extract from the assortment a picture showing a roof that was very much like ours. With the tip of a broken pencil he traced for us the boundary between the original tiles and the ones he’d inserted in their midst. Removing her glasses, Aileen leaned forward to peer point-blank at the photo, and as she did so Sam smiled at me across her back, in a way that momentarily disarmed me, because it was the diffident smile of a son who was looking for his father’s approval. I drew the picture closer to me and nodded my appreciation of his work – and if it did indeed show what it was said to show, the repair had been so skilfully done as to be seamless. ‘You’ll want to get some other estimates,’ said Sam, gathering up his paperwork, ‘but if you decide you’d like me to go ahead, I could start very soon. Middle of next week. Tuesday, maybe. And if you’d like me to do just one job and the rest some other time, that’s OK too. Or maybe get someone else to do the rest, if you’re not entirely happy with what I do. Whatever. It’s up to you. But if you want me to go ahead next week, it’d be handy if you could let me know a.s.a.p., because as things stand I’m free, but in this line of business you have to say yes to whatever comes your way. Someone might ring tonight with something for next week and if it was a definite job I’d have to say I could do it. But as I say, at this moment in time I’m yours.’

  All of this was addressed to Aileen, to an accompaniment of apologetic shrugs and quasi-boyish smiles. Aileen assured him that we would not keep him waiting, and then, as we got up from the table, she gave me a look that said, ‘Why not?’ The look was noticed by Sam, who nonetheless made sure not to appear confident of success. ‘Speak to you soon, I hope,’ he said at the door, shaking hands with both of us once more. His parting shot was a compliment on the house. It was, he told Aileen, exactly the sort of place he’d buy if his lottery ticket came up. There was nothing I could do. Aileen phoned him that evening, to say we’d like him to start work the following week, and to do everything that was on his list.

  Next Tuesday, at eight o’clock on the dot, Sam arrived for work. An hour later the scaffolders arrived. By ten o’clock the flank of the house was covered in scaffolding and Sam was up top, scraping away at the chimney, singing along to his radio. His timekeeping was exemplary: every day he’d turn up on the stroke of eight and leave on the stroke of five. Aileen, who was working at home for most of the time, couldn’t recall ever having come across a more conscientious workman. He allowed himself only half an hour’s break in the middle of the day, to eat his sandwiches; at the end of the day he’d spend twenty minutes clearing up – sweeping the path, cleaning his tools, stacking them neatly in the outhouse. He was as hard-working and fastidious as an apprentice working under the eye of a demanding boss.

  The first day that Sam was at the house, I was too anxious to think straight. In a meeting with the representative of an Italian lighting firm I had a moment when I realised that I couldn’t have repeated anything he’d told me in the preceding five minutes. Coming back on the train, I managed to read about two pages of the newspaper then forget whatever I’d read the moment I turned the page. At any moment, I was thinking, the phone would ring and Aileen would be telling me that we had to talk. Or perhaps, watching Sam at work, she’d been struck by something that had mad
e her wonder – a similarity between myself and him that seemed incontrovertible to her but had eluded me entirely. It was unlikely, but not impossible. I imagined her remarking on the resemblance as a strange coincidence, and then seeing in my face something – the tiniest twitch of an eyelid – from which arose the notion, incredible though it seemed, that this was not a coincidence at all.

  Disaster was inevitable, I told myself. Rather than take a taxi from the station I walked home, feeling like a fugitive who had no option but to turn himself in. From the front door I saw Aileen in the kitchen, at the chopping board, and when she turned and gave me a smile that showed that nothing had changed in the course of the day, it was all I could do to stop myself from laughing. She’d spoken no more than a dozen words to Sam. Mid-morning she’d made him a cup of coffee, which he’d taken up onto the roof straight away, as if he hadn’t a minute to lose; in the afternoon they’d had a brief conversation – he’d wanted to know how we’d feel if he were to work on Saturday. He’d understand, naturally, if we preferred to have the house to ourselves at the weekend, but if we didn’t mind he’d prefer to crack on with it. And there was a couple of other things: the soffits had some rot in them, and in places the pointing on the side wall was in worse shape than he’d thought. He’d asked Aileen to stand at the foot of the scaffolding to watch as he raked the point of a screwdriver through the mortar, raising quantities of dust. If we wanted him to fix it this week, he could; it would take him two days, no more, and he’d mix the mortar to match perfectly with what was there; the soffits would take another day or so. It made sense, said Aileen, to get him to do it all at once, didn’t it? Of course I agreed.