‘I find some things cheap, I am careful but not too careful, eight thousand. I buy new, everything top-spec, five-year guarantee – you know me Mrs Yount, my personal guarantee – twelve thousand.’
‘Does that include the thingies, the electricity thingies?’
‘The wiring. Yes, it includes everything we discussed.’
Arabella was having some alterations made to her dressing room and to Joshua’s bedroom. The lighting in the dressing room was unsatisfactory. Arabella felt that the bright lights around the mirrors flattened the planes of her face and made her look like an Eskimo.
‘I should probably check with Roger. I should, but I can’t be bothered. That’s fine. When did you think you might be able to start?’
Zbigniew was a sharp student of his British customers and knew that in this country builders had a reputation for specific things: they were expensive and lazy; they were never available when you wanted them; they took over your house and behaved as if it were theirs during the work; and they left things half-finished and went off to another job so that the last phase of the work dragged on for months. He set out always to be the opposite of all those things and to stick to this policy at all times. So although he had a few things due to start, he said, ‘Next week.’
‘Oh, fantastic,’ said Arabella, adjusting her hair behind her ear. ‘Fabulous! That’s so great!’
Arabella had a habit of overstating things, one that she had so much internalised that it was not always easy for she herself to tell when she was mildly pleased about something and when she was genuinely delighted. Gresham’s Law was at work: the cheap money of overstatement was gradually driving out the good money of true feeling. But she was in this case genuinely pleased. She wanted the changes made to her room and she wanted them soon and was pleased that Bogdan would be able to do them, because, beneath the hyperbole, she liked and trusted him.
‘I think I should go now,’ said Zbigniew/Bogdan. He took up his pad and pencil and put them in his bag. ‘Next week?’
‘Thank you so much. Next week it is. Crack of dawn. Lovely! Thanks, Bogdan.’
He slung his bag over his shoulder and went out into the street. It was raining but not cold in a serious Polish way. Some of the houses had Christmas decorations up; a couple of them were places where Zbigniew had done some work over the past year. He liked walking past places where he had done things. He never forgot a work project, the bathroom conversion over there and the loft conversion where they’d put a shower in against all advice and then had to run cables up to the top floor to power the immersion heater. The memory of the work on these places was a muscle memory, a physical sensation: he could feel it in his bones, the effort, the exertion, the tired fingers and aching back at the end of the day. But it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. Real work never left you feeling worse.
His first job in London had been on a crew in the next street, Mackell Road, and someone had recommended them to number 54 in this street; the job was for one man and his old friend Piotr had let him take it, for which Zbigniew was and always would be grateful. That was when he had acquired his London nickname, too, because there was a Bogdan on the crew and the man in Pepys Road had got the names mixed up, and Zbigniew had never corrected him. He quite liked being called Bogdan because it left no doubt in his mind that he did not really live in London, that his life here was a temporary interlude: he was there to work and make money before going home to his real life in Poland. Zbigniew did not know whether that would be in a year’s time or five years or ten, but he knew it was going to happen. He was Polish and his real life would be in Poland.
Arabella would have been disappointed if she had known what her Bogdan thought of her, because the truth was, he thought very little. He didn’t have a negative impression of her, or a positive one; he neither fancied her, disliked her, was interested in her, or had any other feeling about her at all. She was a client and that was it. Zbigniew thought of all his clients the same way: they were people who paid him to do work and had certain expectations which he set out to fulfil. There was no more to it than that.
As for their wealth – Arabella’s wealth, the wealth of all his clients – he did not dwell on it but he did notice it. A boy who grew up in a tower block on the outskirts of Warsaw could not fail to notice marble worktops, teak furniture, carpets and clothes and adult toys and the routine daily extravagances that were everywhere in this city. You also couldn’t fail to notice the expense, the grotesque costliness of more or less everything, from accommodation to transport to food to clothes; and as for going out to have some fun, that was almost impossible. The feeling of this cash leaking away just in ordinary life depressed Zbigniew. But in another sense it was the reason he was here: everything was so expensive because the British had lots of money. He was there to earn it from them. There was in Zbigniew’s opinion something fundamentally wrong with a culture that had all this work and all this money going spare, just waiting for someone to come in and pick it up, almost as if the money were just left lying around in the street – but that was not his concern. If the British wanted to give work and money away that was fine with him.
His mobile rang. It was Piotr.
‘Your turn to cook tonight,’ Piotr said in Polish. ‘I got some kielbasa from the shop, they’re in the fridge. Don’t eat them all before I get back, OK?’
Zbigniew, Piotr, and four friends lived in a two-bedroom flat in Croydon. The flat was sublet from an Italian who in turn sublet it from a British man who rented it from the council, and the rent was ?200 a week. They had to be careful about noise because if the other residents reported them they would be kicked out – but in fact the polite, well-built young men were popular tenants in the flats, whose other occupants were old and white and, as one of them once told Zbigniew in the hallway, ‘just grateful you aren’t Pakis’.
‘You’re seeing Dana,’ said Zbigniew – Dana being Piotr’s latest potential love interest, a Czech girl he’d met in the pub. ‘If you’re not back by ten, no kielbasa.’
‘If I’m not back by ten…’ said Piotr.
‘
Now there was the wait for the Tube. Five minutes, said the board, but that meant nothing. One thing about London which was like Warsaw was the difficult transport and the grumbling stoicism of the people who used it. The other guys at the flat were all out on the same job today and would be coming back in Piotr’s trashed Ford van, which he had bought for next to nothing and had sort-of fixed up; Zbigniew hated using the van because there was such a strong feeling there was no reliability about getting to where you wanted to go. Zbigniew liked to feel in control.
A crowd of black kids arrived on the platform. Zbigniew had nothing against black people but after three years in England he had not yet got to the point where he did not even register their presence. He had a tendency to assess whether or not they looked likely to be trouble. These kids, seven or eight boys and girls, were loud – the girls more so than the boys, as if proving a point, which in this country often seemed to be the way. They were all simultaneously teasing each other about something.
‘You never-’
‘He never-’
‘Batty man-’
But Zbigniew could see that these were good kids being noisy rather than bad ones on the verge of causing trouble. The old lady beside him, who had been waiting on the platform when he got there, wasn’t happy. She would be thinking about her journey in the company of these shouting children. She was probably also wondering about walking off down the platform to somewhere else and worrying about that looking too rude. She wouldn’t want to seem racist. Zbigniew knew that it was a big thing in this country not to seem racist. In his opinion people made too much fuss about it. People did not like people who were not like them, that was a plain fact of life. You had to get on with things anyway. Who cares if people don’t like each other because of the colour of their skin?
The train came, heading for Morden. The rowdy children got on first, pushing past people who were trying to get off. There was nowhere to sit. The kids went to the other side of the compartment and a couple of them took seats. The others were standing around them and they were all still talking and yelling and showing everybody their high spirits. Most people in the train succeeded in ignoring them. Another of the ways in which London was like Warsaw was the way in which people occupied their own spaces, went inside themselves, on public transport.
