a lap rather than a lap and a half. A mere break, a breath of fresh air. Hal will be contemplative, his nose close to the ground, his concentration as thorough as that of an avid reader.
‘Anyway, this pipe. Oh, don’t pull that face, Sadie. And don’t tell me that I’ll have to wait for the man of the house to come home before I can have a decision.’
‘You could build an Eiffel Tower from these pipes before he comes home.’
‘Still working hard?’
‘Still working hard.’
‘Still at the hostel?’
‘Manager now.’
‘And how is he?’
‘The same. Fine. Thriving. Busy.’
‘Good. Let’s give the Eiffel Tower a miss and hurry up with this.’ He brandishes the sawn-off pipe.
‘I’m a Libran.’
‘So?’
‘So, I can’t make decisions.’
‘You believe in all that?’
‘No. Just happens to be true, in my case.’
Hal is coming up behind me. He is only ever inelegant when on the stairs, his four legs encountering something designed for two. Determinedly digging his way up the steps, plucky but gawky, he looks like a puppy.
‘Hal’s a Taurus.’
‘Hal’s a dog.’
‘He’s a typical Taurus.’
‘He’s a typical dog, Sadie.’
While I rub Hal’s head, his ears, he is butting my hands. I am perversely proud of his prettiness. Would I love him quite so much if he were plain? I did adopt him unseen. His previous owners, friends of friends, were going to live abroad for several years. Having been persuaded to take him, I drove the two hundred miles to fetch him. I had been told that he was a Labrador cross: the look of a Labrador, but smaller. I had not been told that he had the slender face of a deer, that he was all cheekbones.
‘You spoil that mutt.’
‘So? Isn’t life hard enough without a bit of spoiling? And he’s four. Didn’t people spoil you when you were four?’
‘I was a person.’
‘When you were four? You sure, Jason?’
Hal, with his impeccable manners, his love of home and liking for everything to be just so, seems human. He is more domesticated than I am.
Jason’s mobile phone screams from the tool box. During all the years that he has been coming here, he has carried this particular prop: a workhorse of a mobile phone, antiquated and bulky.
He tells me, ‘I’m not answering.’
‘Mobiles are for answering; that’s what they’re for.’
Despairing of me, he snatches the phone from the box, stops the noise, listens intently.
‘Yep. Okay. Six-ish. In a while, crocodile.’
He slots down the aerial, and I think of the shop on the way to the park: For all your satellite and aerial needs. Needs that I do not know that I have. Every day, I resist the urge to go in there and ask, All my satellite and aerial needs?
Jason says, ‘My eldest: could I pick her up from rehearsal on my way home.’
I am awed by his daughters’ social schedules, by their mother’s fixing of old-fashioned girlhoods for them: stage school, horse-riding, hockey club and music lessons. The household seems to run like a finishing school, but the finish is a tough one: from what Jason says, the activities do not revolve around an aim to become accomplished, to learn, but a desire to be equipped: with competitiveness and a sense of fair play, improved posture and strengthened bones.
As a child, I had no place in any world apart from that of my mother’s. Unless I was in school, I went everywhere with her, which was nowhere: the park, the shops. The only advice that I remember from her was that there is nothing more important than a good marriage, but she never told me how to make one because she did not know. Odd to think of my parents now, in early retirement, relatively companionable, apparently having reached some kind of truce.
‘Just one more year of school for my eldest.’
‘And then?’
‘Wants to work in a shoe shop. Says she loves shoes.’ He frowns into the tool box. ‘Does that mean that I love power showers and central heating systems? Suppose I do, though.’ He looks up at me. ‘Do you think you’ll have kids, now?’
‘I have to find a job first: that’s the plan.’ Instantly, I realise how ridiculous this must sound to him. I try to explain, ‘I need a life, Jason.’
‘You have a life, don’t you?’ He is genuinely puzzled.
I used to be a carer: that is the currently favoured term. Caring is the buzz word for what I did, here, at home, for eight years. So perhaps, now that it is all over, I should turn professional. There is nothing professional, though, about the jobs in nursing homes that are advertised every week in our local newspaper. Unsociable hours and low pay. If I had such a job, I would see even less of Philip. Hard work for very little money, he says, and we have no real need of the money, so why work simply for the sake of working? He says that I should do something that I want to do. But this is exactly my problem: what do I want to do? What can I do? I have a sense that I should train for something, learn something, but training is extensive, expensive, and I have no experience of anything, so no one would want me for their oversubscribed courses. And even if I did train, would there be a job for me? My problem is that I have been away from the world for too long. I cannot imagine how other people cope with the power struggles, timetables, deadlines, and expectations, not least the expectation that they will leave the house every day, for most of the day. No, I do not want to do anything. But I know that I cannot stay as I am.
‘You’re looking for a job?’
I wrinkle my nose: ambivalent confirmation. This morning’s cursory look through the newspaper ended prematurely in a perusal of adverts, one of which was entitled, Impotence problems?
Impotence problems? Problems over and above the impotence?
There were other adverts: Hair loss?, Flabby belly?, Panic attacks?
And I thought that I had problems.
‘Coffee?’
‘Wonderful.’
As soon as I move, Hal whips from his prone position. He is due his lunch. What would he have done if I had forgotten? I love to watch him with his food. Fast but fastidious, he laps up the gravy before beginning on the biscuits. His tail, usually wagging, will droop: serious happiness.
I am a couple of stairs down when Jason calls, ‘You love piano music, don’t you. What’s playing, now, downstairs? Scott Joplin?’
‘No, but you’re close. It’s a …’ I flinch from using the word pastiche, ‘… fake, a modern fake.’
Will he ask why a fake, when we can have the real Scott Joplin? Could I explain that but for the work of this particular, later composer, William Bolcom, there would have been no Scott Joplin? No Scott Joplin as we know him. He would have been unknown; dead and unknown.
‘Would you rather hear something else?’ Philip says that my listening to piano music is pathological. He reels from Czerny, Nancarrow. ‘Because I can play you … oh, I don’t know’ … – what was I playing earlier? – ‘The Au Pairs?’
He laughs. ‘Seriously? The Au Pairs?’
‘An old tape.’