How Hard Can It Be?. Allison PearsonЧитать онлайн книгу.
she actually hit me. She didn’t mean to hit me. It was an accident.
‘Sorry. Is bad time, Kate?’
‘No, no, it’s fine. Really. Come in. Sorry, Piotr. It’s just Emily had an accident, she fell off her bike, but she thinks I’m making a fuss about nothing.’
Without being asked, he takes the glasses out of my hand, retrieves the missing lens which is on the floor next to Lenny’s basket, and begins to work it back into its frame. ‘Emily she is teenage. Mum she’s always say wrong things, isn’t it?’
Despite wanting rather badly to cry, I find myself laughing. ‘That’s so true. A mother’s place is in the wrong, Piotr. Wrong is my permanent address at the moment. Would you like some tea? I’ve got some proper tea today, you’ll be pleased to hear.’
In his new spiritual incarnation, Richard has acquired a wide range of tranquillity teas. Rhubarb and Rosemary, Dandelion, Lemon, Nettle and Manuka Honey, and something in a urine-coloured box called Camomindfulness. On the recommendation of Joely at the counselling centre, in February he presented me with Panax Ginseng, said to be good for hot flushes and night sweats. A thoughtful present although, if you were being picky, perhaps not totally ideal for the red-hot lover’s message of Valentine’s Day. (After receiving a set of Jamie Oliver saucepans for Christmas I thought we’d reached a low point in the history of Rich’s gifts to me, but clearly there is plenty of floor below that to fall through.) It takes a lot to perturb Piotr, whose temperament feels as generous and easy as his countenance, but even he recoiled when I said we had run out of builders’ tea and offered him Dandelion instead.
‘In my contree, dantyline means wet bed like children’s,’ he smiled, revealing a mouth of characterful, uneven teeth of the kind that have pretty much died out among the British middle classes.
Piotr’s English is bad, yet strangely appealing. I feel no need to correct it, as I do with Ben and Em, because (a) that would be horribly patronising and (b) I love the mistakes he makes because they are so expressive (which I guess is horribly patronising). That’s what happens with the kids, isn’t it? You correct their errors and their speech gets better and better until, one day, they don’t say those funny, sweet things any more. I can’t press Rewind and hear Ben say, ‘I did go’d fast did I Mummy’ or a five-year-old Emily ask if she can come with me to the ‘Egg Pie Snake Building’ (Empire State sounds so dull by comparison) or have ‘piz-ghetti’ for dinner. Or tell me, ‘I’m not a baby I’m a togg-er-ler.’ Sometimes I think I wished away their childhood so life would be easier; now I have the rest of my life to wish it back.
I put water in a saucepan and olive oil and butter in a casserole on the Aga. Kettle not working again while Piotr has the electricity switched off. Methodically, I start preparing the onions, carrots and celery for bolognese, our family’s all-purpose comfort food. It’s the Marcella Hazan recipe and I know it so well that her quaintly formal words float into my head as I chop. The addition of milk ‘lends a desirable sweetness’. Perfectly true, it’s the magic ingredient you could never guess. In the larder – a tiny, pitch-black cupboard leading off the utility room – I grope for tinned tomatoes in the dark and my hand finds a Hammer Horror cobweb. It’s the size and shape of a tennis racquet. Uch. Fetch some kitchen wipes and start to clean down the slatted wooden shelves.
I always dreamt of having an Aga. Visions of home-baked bread, delicious stews murmuring to themselves on the range and maybe even an orphaned baby lamb being gently brought back to life in the warming drawer. Unclear where I was going to find a lamb, except in the meat aisle of Waitrose, and therefore well past the point of reviving, but the daydream persisted. Now, I realise my Aga fantasy was of the pristine magazine kind that comes equipped with its own Mary Berry. Ours is a malevolent old beast encrusted with the splashed fat of half a century and has only two temperatures: lukewarm and crematorium. You know, I really don’t think it likes me. Shortly after we moved in, I put a cauliflower cheese in the top oven; ten minutes later I prised open the heavy door to take a peek and found a petrified forest with these perfect little charred florets like mini oak trees.
Richard, who was cross, hungry and partial to cauliflower cheese, said it looked like one of those art installations that would have a pretentious title like The Physical Impossibility of Dinner in the Mind of Someone Starving. It’s since become one of his favourite Calamity Kate anecdotes, and I can’t help noticing he finds it much funnier when he’s telling other people than he did at the time.
Not that I’m in any position to complain. Am still trying to convince Rich that this house was a fantastic buy. We agreed that in order to move to Commuterland, so I could get into London and back every day, we would have to downsize and find a place with lower outgoings. (No way could we afford to buy in the capital, not after a period up North. I checked on Rightmove and our old house, the Hackney Heap, is worth £1.2 million now.) We’d just had an offer accepted on a four-bedroom new-build, convenient for the train station, when I took the agent’s advice that I should ‘just pop in’ and see a ‘charming period gem of considerable potential, in need of sensitive updating’.
Fate and the weather conspired against me. It was one of those glittering, glad-to-be-alive days when a bitingly clear cobalt sky makes you feel your soul has left your body and is soaring heavenward. If only it had been raining. Maybe I would have seen that a patchwork of ivy and moss covering three exterior walls, a rickety tiled roof and two chimneys, each the size of a four-by-four, did not, as I preferred to believe, suggest an enchanted castle just waiting to be released from a spell of cruel neglect.
‘Exactly how much will it cost to hack through the foliage to free Sleeping Beauty, and what will the brickwork be like underneath once we get her out?’ These were not among the questions I asked as I stood on the terrace at the back, marvelling at the honeyed stone in which the house was constructed three centuries ago. The view down the garden was like an Impressionist painting – a vivid splash of green lawn fringed with mascara smudges of pine and beech. I could practically hear the strains of Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Lark Ascending’ as I drank in this quintessentially English scene; the imagined music was so potent it drowned out the whooshing of the nearby M11, which would become a roar once the trees had shed their leaves and we had signed the contract. Caveat emptor.
We did go back to check out the new-build property, Rich and I. How bland and cramped it seemed with its specially made, teeny, doll’s house furniture (a cynical developer’s trick to make the rooms look bigger, or so a designer friend told me). The agent said the developer was prepared to meet us halfway and would pay the stamp duty, such a huge saving that Rich gave a low, appreciative whistle. But I had lost my heart to another and found only fault where there were bargains and benefits to be had. I wanted the period gem with the gracious proportions and the fine old staircase, its mahogany handrail just visible through layers of chipped paint.
The rival agent said that because it was a renovation project which ‘very few people have the imagination to take on’ (i.e. no one but you is nuts enough to even attempt it), the owner was ‘prepared to consider knocking a significant amount off the asking price’ (they were desperate to sell, it had been on the market more than a year and there was a grave shortage of suckers prepared to share a bath with a daddy-long-legs and her nineteen children). I was able to clinch the deal with Richard by pointing out that the house was in the catchment area of a superb secondary school. Result! True, some persuasion-sex may have been involved, but I had my dream property, and that was orgasm enough.
Except Richard pretty much hated the house from Day One. He calls it ‘Gormenghastly’, and not affectionately either. Anything that goes wrong – oh, let me count the ways! – demonstrates that I made a poor decision and causes him to crow in a rather unpleasant manner. On the first evening we spent here, he actually produced a DVD of a Tom Hanks movie called The Money Pit, which is about a couple who try to restore a hopelessly dilapidated house. It was funny until I plugged in an electric heater to warm up the freezing sitting room and all the lights fused and the TV went phffft.
I wish I could say that I’ve proved my doubting husband wrong. Despite Piotr’s heroic efforts, and almost constant house calls from Polish guys bearing ladders, hammers and saws,