somewhere far away like that and I’m sure a publicly funded committee will give you a prize. If we’ve got to have some bloody building in this garden – of which I’m far from being entirely convinced – then what we’re going to have is an English country house, with bricks or dry-stone walls or some decent local material.’
‘This doesn’t sound like the angry young Alan Martello,’ I’d said sweetly. ‘New styles of architecture, a change of heart, isn’t that the sort of thing you’ve always been keen on?’
‘I like
It was Alan at his most gruff, charming, flirtatious and I was grateful that he’d felt able to yell at me in the old affectionate way while I’d been in the process of divorcing his son. So of course I’d gone away and put together a plan of impeccably rural appearance, complete with a rather amusing gambrel roof. It was designed in the sense that you design the contents of your shopping trolley as you walk around Sainsbury’s. The prefabricated frame construction house was Norwegian, though manufactured in Malaysia. Alan would at least have been grateful to know that the extraction of the raw materials probably involved the destruction of a small patch of rain forest.
‘What’s this up here, Mrs Martello?’ Jim Weston had asked, jabbing at the plan with his pipe.
‘Please call me Jane, Jim. They’re the ridge tiles, set in mortar.’
‘Hmm.’ He’d replaced his pipe firmly in his mouth.
‘What do you want to go messing about with mortar for?’
‘Jim, we can’t argue about this now. It’s all arranged. It’s bought and paid for. We’ve just got to put it together.’
‘Hmm,’ he’d grunted.
‘We excavate here, just a few feet down…’
‘Just,’ Jim had muttered.
‘Then the footings, here and here, and then the hard core, then the damp-course and the damp proof membrane, then concrete and then the tiled ground floor on top of that. The rest is a matter of just joining it together.’
‘Damp-course?’ Jim had said dubiously.
‘Yes, unfortunately there was a Public Health Act passed back in 1875, so I’m afraid we’re stuck with that.’
Now, at the beginning of the first day of work, Jim looked more like something that was growing in the garden than a man who had come to supervise, or pretend to supervise, work in it. His face had been left outside in all weathers and had attained a complexion like the rear end of a toad. Hair sprouted from his nose and ears like moss on an ancient rock. He really was old now and his job consisted of telling his son and his nephew what to do. Their job consisted of ignoring what he said. I shook hands with them as well.
‘What’s this about
‘Only a spadeful. I just said I’d like to dig the first spadeful, if that’s all right. It’s important to me.’
I’ve been an architect for nearly fifteen years now, and whenever I work on a building, I have a rule, which amounts almost to a superstition, that I must be there to see the first spade being dug into the ground. It’s a moment of pure sensual pleasure, really, and I sometimes wish that I could do it myself with my own bare hands. After months, sometimes even years, of drawing up the plans and the specifications and obtaining tenders and calming the nerves of the client and bargaining with some functionary in the planning department, after all the compromises and the paper arguments, it’s good to go outside and remind myself that it’s all about dirt and brick and fitting the pipes together so they don’t crack in the winter.
Best of all are the ten- or fifteen-metre excavations which precede the really big buildings. You stand on the edge of a site somewhere in the City of London and peer down at a couple of thousand years of fragments of other people’s lives. You’ll see the suspicion of an ancient building, sometimes, and I’ve heard all the rumours of the contractors surreptitiously pouring concrete across an old Roman floor so that there’s no nonsense about waiting for the archaeologists to give you the nod before the building goes up. We’re constructing the spaces for our own lives on the squashed remnants of our forgotten predecessors and in a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand years they’ll be building on top of our rusting joists and crumbling concrete. On top of our dead.
This was to be the smallest of holes, a scratching of the surface. John, Jim’s son, handed me a spade. I’d measured the area out on the previous day and defined it with cord and now I walked into the middle of the rectangular space and pushed the blade into the ground and stood on it, forcing it into the turf.
‘Mind your nails, girl,’ said Jim behind me.
I pulled the handle of the spade down towards me. The turf crackled and split and a satisfying wedge of soil and clay appeared.
‘Nice and soft,’ I said.
‘The boys’ll just finish it off, then,’ said Jim. ‘If that’s all right with you.’
A hand on my shoulder made me start. It was Theo. The Theo Martello in my mind is seventeen years old with shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, soft white translucent skin, full lips, with a prominent cupid’s bow, that taste slightly of burnt tobacco. He is tall and thin and wears a long army-surplus greatcoat. I find his remembered figure hard to reconcile with this – oh my God – forty-something-year-old man standing in front of me with gaunt chiselled features, rough unshaven stubble, cropped greying hair, and hard lines around his eyes. He’s middle-aged.
‘We didn’t see you last night,’ he said. ‘We arrived late.’
‘I went to bed early. What’re you doing up at this time?’
‘I wanted to see you.’
He pulled me towards him and hugged me close for a long time. I held my favourite brother-in-law tightly.
‘Oh, Theo,’ I said, when he let me go. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry about Claud.’
He smiled. ‘Don’t be. Just do what you have to do. It was brave of you to come up here and beard everyone in the family den. By the way, who
‘Everybody, of course. All the Martellos. And all the Cranes too, for what we’re worth. Dad and my brother and his lot aren’t here yet, but, by the time they arrive, I count that there’ll be twenty-four guests. The Royal family may be collapsing, and we may have lost the meaning of Christmas, but the annual gathering for the Martello mushroom hunt goes on undiminished.’
Theo raised his eyebrows. The lines around his eyes and mouth creased in a smile. ‘You mock.’
‘No. I’m nervous, I suppose. God, Theo, do you remember, years ago, some ferry was sinking and a rescue boat pulled alongside and the women and children couldn’t get across. So this man lay across between the two boats and the women and children walked across him.’
Theo laughed. ‘You were the worn-out human bridge, were you?’ he said.
‘I felt like it sometimes. Or at least Claud and I were. The weak link that held the Cranes and the Martellos together.’
Theo’s expression hardened. ‘You flatter yourself, Jane. We’re all linked. We’re one family really. And anyway, if there’s one link, it’s the friendship between our fathers that started it, before we were born. Let’s give them credit for that at least.’ He smiled again. ‘At best you were just a secondary link. A supporting mortice or whatever?’
I couldn’t help giggling. ‘Do I hear a technical term? What, pray, is a supporting mortice?’
‘All right, all right, you’re the builder. I never did woodwork. And I’m glad you came here, even if it meant running the gauntlet.’
‘I had to supervise this, didn’t I? Now I feel like I’m going to cry over my drawings and smudge them.’
We went through the French windows into the kitchen and collected mugs of coffee. From upstairs there was the sound of bodies stirring, cups clinking, lavatories flushing in the house behind us as we stepped back out.
‘Shut the door behind you, for fuck’s sake,’ somebody yelled from inside. ‘It’s freezing.’
‘Okay, okay, I’m just stepping outside.’ It was Theo’s brother, Jonah.
‘Hello, Fred,’ said Theo.
Jonah nodded in acknowledgement of the tired Martello joke. The point was that Jonah and his twin brother, Alfred, had been indistinguishable, as children at least. Theo had once told me that they had actually slept with each other’s girlfriends (without the knowledge of the young women concerned), which I’d been too shocked to believe until I had seen the way they’d behaved in all other matters when they had grown up.
‘The way to tell us apart, Theo,’ said Jonah, ‘is that Fred is the one with the red nose and without the sun
