Capital

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.
    For the first few days Zbigniew worked on number 42 Pepys Road, he was tense, without being able to understand why; and then it occurred to him that it was about Davina. As if he expected at any moment to hear the doorbell ring and find her on the step outside, or waiting for him when he got back to the flat. When his mobile rang, he thought it was her; when he saw a woman of the right age with the same hair colour, he had a flash of what he thought was recognition, until he had a better look and realised the truth. His nerves were juddering with the expected confrontation. This time, he had decided, he would not be calm and moderate. If she had another go at unbreaking up, he would be angry and rude. That should work.
    He liked working alone, but it was strange to be on his own in an empty house all day. It was not precise or difficult work, and it was physically tiring in exactly the manner he found welcome. Most of the house had not been touched in a long time; the wallpaper must be close to fifty years old – Mary had said she never remembered a time before it. At points it crumbled in his hands as he tried to strip it off, sending a fine powder over him, the dry-damp smell of paper and old glue. The wiring was as old as any he had ever seen; again, half a