John Lanchester - Capital

Home – that word had a different charge for Mary, now. Where was home? Maldon, of course. There was now nowhere else in her life, no bolt-hole, nowhere she could run away and hide, no mother to run to. This, the small-talky after-ceremony, was harder than the service itself had been. One of the men from the crematorium appeared in the entrance and disappeared back in again. Mary got the impression that lingering here was something of an inconvenience for the staff – maybe they had another cremation booked. In fact, thinking about it, they were bound to. But she could not find in herself any appetite for hurrying up, shooing people away, or any other form of being helpful. Not today.

‘I’m so sorry’ is what people mainly said, or sometimes ‘I am sorry for your loss.’ The Indian newsagent, whom Mary was surprised and pleased to see, said that; so did the man down the street whose name she didn’t know, who’d been smiley and friendly; so did the two of Albert’s old colleagues who came. Greatly to Mary’s surprise, so did the Polish builder who had come to the house to give a quote for the renovations. It must be a Polish thing, she thought. Maybe they liked funerals. She would have to make up her mind what to do about the house, and she was strongly minded to take the Pole’s quote, renovate, and then sell; the house would be worth, what, two million pounds? It was ridiculous, but it was also what it was. She caught herself having these thoughts and felt ashamed. ‘With her mother not cold in the ground’ – but in fact her mother had already gone into the flames.

Graham, looking very smart in a suit, was standing close by as if he was keeping an eye on her. He was also looking, as he often did, faintly knowing and ironic. Her son looked as if he thought he could tell what you were thinking. Well, what I’m thinking is, My mum’s dead, and I’m rich.

It took two weeks for Mary to decide what to do with 42 Pepys Road. After the funeral, she had a small collapse. Nothing dramatic, just that she felt tired all the time, and found it impossible to make even the smallest decisions. Every choice that she could delegate to Alan, she did. When she couldn’t, she boiled with indecision. One symptom was that she found she was unable to decide what to cook. She’d been looking forward to getting back to cooking, and because she had lived on ready meals while her mother was dying, being back in her own kitchen making proper food felt like a good thing to do. There was also the fact that Ben, though he obviously would not say so, because that would involve communicating in something other than a grunt, liked her cooking and greatly preferred it to his father’s non-cooking.

Perhaps for that very reason, she couldn’t muster the mental or physical energy to cook properly. The need to decide what to make for supper would leave her standing in front of the fridge for ten minutes, not feeling depressed or frustrated or angry or resentful about having to make the meal, not consciously feeling anything, just unable to choose between pasta and a ready-meal shepherd’s pie. She could see her cookbooks on the shelf, Nigella and Nigel and Delia and Jamie, the unopened books standing there as if reproachfully, their arms folded. At Sainsbury’s in Maldon she would stand in front of the frozen food cabinet, unable to discriminate between the Bird’s Eye fish fingers, twenty-four for £4.98, and the Sainsbury’s own-brand fish fingers, same-size box, in all probability made by the same people, for £4.49. But what if they weren’t the same? But what if they were? She took to calling Alan at work and asking him what he wanted, so she didn’t have to make up her mind. It was the same with watching TV, with deciding which radio station to have on in the background, with choosing what clothes to wear. Everything just seemed like a huge effort. Actual grief would hit her too, completely unpredictably, catching her as she heard ‘Love Me Do’ on an oldies station or as she was standing in a queue at the bank and saw a woman of about her mother’s age, hunched over to fish something out of her handbag in exactly the way her mother had used to do – grief would come and lift her off her feet, like a wave; but the fatigue and demoralisation she felt were different from that. They were there all the time, like the weather.

There was no miracle, she didn’t wake up one morning and suddenly feel different, but there were at first moments, then hours when the feeling lifted. The waves of grief still came but she didn’t feel knackered and indecisive all the time. She made Jamie’s guinea fowl with fresh oranges. It was revolting – the recipe didn’t work, it was one of Jamie’s duff ones – in fact it was an obviously stupid idea, chicken with oranges? – but she felt so much better because she had found the energy to make it. Gradually she found she could make small decisions, then bigger ones, then one evening she found she wasn’t just ready to think about what to do about the house: she found that she had already decided. The Polish builder didn’t have experience running a job quite this size; but he had done all the constituent parts, he had experienced contacts who could help, he had offered the lowest quote (by 30 per cent) and he had come to her mother’s funeral.

She talked it through with Alan. ‘I’m all in favour of buying British,’ he said, ‘but a third cheaper is a third cheaper.’ Then she called the Pole on his mobile. He sounded pleased and surprised and a week later began work on number 42, starting by stripping down and redecorating the rooms at the top of the house. And now he was living there too, after a conversation he’d had with Mary when she came down to check on progress with the house – something they’d agreed she would do once every two to four weeks. Not minding about being checked up on was one of Zbigniew’s ways of being different from English builders.

‘I don’t like it being unoccupied,’ Mary said. She disliked the thought of this house, which had in her memory never not had her mother in it, now lying empty. The sense of someone missing was too big; it left too big a gap in the world.

‘This is easy to fix,’ said Zbigniew. ‘I can stay here. Mattress on floor. I don’t mind. That way, there’s always someone in the building. It’s more secure, it makes your insurance cheaper because the house is occupied’ – Mary hadn’t thought of that – ‘and I can get to work earlier and finish later so the job is done more quickly.’

‘Well, let me talk it over with my husband, but it seems like a good thought,’ said Mary. And then two days later she had called back and said yes.

That was how Zbigniew came to be doing up, and living in, 42 Pepys Road. The work question was a little awkward for Zbigniew, because some of the work would require Piotr’s crew, and he and Piotr’s relationship had never fully recovered from Davina. But they agreed a schedule. It was good of Piotr, who did not take a cut, and in effect by doing this was taking the decisive step in letting Zbigniew set up on his own – in other words, they were getting ready to let their work go in separate directions. So be it. The crew weren’t free until later, so Zbigniew would do the single-man jobs, the fiddly redecorating, at the start, and the manpower and specialist jobs in a couple of months’ time.

There was a loft, but Mary and Alan had decided that they wouldn’t fix that up themselves – which was good news for Zbigniew, because although he had worked on lofts, he wasn’t sure he could have run a conversion project as the man in charge. Ditto the basement: Zbigniew had done basements, had had the experience of sweating London clay out of his pores for weeks, and he wasn’t at all sorry not to be doing it here. In both cases (though he didn’t know this) the reason was that the inheritance tax bill after Petunia’s death had been so big that they had no capital left to do up the house before selling it. Alan could have borrowed the money, but they both felt there was something surreal about inheriting a lot of cash and immediately going into debt as a result. Alan and Mary were old-fashioned like that. So Zbigniew was working on his own, beginning with the small rooms at the top of the house, stripping the wallpaper, taking out a strange plasterboard partition that had been there since Mary’s childhood and that made one of the small bedrooms into two even smaller rooms, ripping out the wiring, and painting the walls with test colours for Mary to vet on her next visit to Pepys Road. Zbigniew’s target was to finish the work in about four months.