It’s only 11am on Monday morning and already it seems like a very long week. Sales specialist Brenda puts down her pen: “OK, that’s the doors ordered.” I pull out my payment card, only for her to glance coldly at it. “Good, now we look at handles!” She slams another huge catalogue on to the counter between us. The heavy thunk is like an executioner’s axe as another hour of my life hits the floor. Then she pauses, head on shoulder, eyeballing me in what seems to be an act of door-furniture-induced coquetry: “But first, Adam, how do you feel about escutcheons?”
My hop into town to buy new doors for the house and replace the 1950s hardboard horrors Helen hated, is running at two hours and counting. I’ve looked at endless variations on the woody theme, suffering from the tyranny of too much choice.
Added to which pain is the unwelcome memory of flicking through another high-end door sales brochure. I flashback many months to sitting with Helen’s sister Sarah, studying coffin specifications at the undertaker’s. Even the names are similar – Lincoln, Nostalgia, Hamilton, Cleveland, Senator, Westminster – three being doors to open and three having lids to close. Do manufacturers think these names help? It says something about my new mindset that I now shrug, not shudder, from emotional ambushes like this; even chuckling at the absurdity. I’ve noticed that more of my memories of Helen are of the 24 years before she was ill, which armours me with a much stronger buffer against grief’s sharpest onslaughts. If she would have laughed, then so do I. And she laughed a lot.
What I don’t have is a buffer against Brenda’s well-intentioned but bottomless enthusiasm for her job. I’m Alan Rickman’s character in Love Actually, whose quick exit from the jewellery counter is thwarted by Rowan Atkinson’s overzealous Christmas-wrapping routine. I’m afraid to open my mouth in case it adds another layer of complexity and delay. And what the bollocks is an escutcheon anyway?
Much, much later, as payment goes through, Brenda looks up from the card machine, takes off her glasses and skewers me with a Paddington Bear-scale hard stare. “Will they be well hung or are you going to upset me by doing it yourself?” I stare back, not sensing any mirth at the Carry On-like double entendres, as she continues. “I can’t bear it when people come back because they have cocked up DIY.” My stifled snigger is overwhelmed by the implied insult to my hunter-gatherer DIY prowess.
In truth I am very good at DIY; not because I prowl the house in a tool belt but because I know what I’m profoundly crap at. Then I reassure her with: “Don’t worry, I’ve a man who’ll hang them for me.” She looks happy.
“Great. I’d prefer to sell fewer doors than have blokes cock up and they’re not well hung.” Still not a flicker. I take my receipt and make a swift exit while it’s still daylight and before Sid James appears lewdly from stage left.
But I do have a man, albeit an old man. The brilliant, semi-retired chippy Frank, who is currently painting the house with barely a wry smile at my middle-England “feature wall” plan he is meant to be following. Brilliantly good value, he can hang three doors in six hours. This is only countered by the fact that he is not the fastest painter on earth. He’s been with us six weeks already, but, with nanny Annie on maternity leave, the fact that he’s in the house when the children arrive home from school gets me off the hook about always being back by 3.30pm. By comparison with her, he’s also spectacularly more productive, like a Mary Poppins whose bag produces hand tools not hat stands.
What’s really going on? I have a new focus in updating and improving the house so it matches my mood. This urge to nest may be comparable to that experienced by some women in the third trimester of pregnancy – maybe grief and death have trimesters like birth and life. While I’ve no clue what I’m expecting to arrive, I’ll be ready when the door opens.
Adam Golightly is a pseudonym
