Now that the builders have left, my wife is trying to involve me more fully in upcoming renovations. I am trying to finish the crossword.
“I do everything,” she says. “And you do nothing.”
“Table,” I say, pointing to the newly refinished kitchen table. “Light.”
“You wired the light wrong,” she says. “The table is lovely, but that was a week ago.”
“What do you want me to do?” I say.
“Come this way,” she says. She leads me into the hall, to the spot where a former doorway has been walled up by the builders. The plastering is smooth and even, but there’s a metre gap with no skirting board or dado rail.
“Don’t they do that?” I ask.
“No,” my wife says. “We do that.”
“OK,” I say. “Leave it with me.”
This is how I find myself spending an entire afternoon visiting websites called Skirting World, Skirting4u, Skirting Boards Direct and Skirting Express. By nightfall, I’ve studied several hundred types of skirting board in profile. None of them answers my needs. My dado rail is so unlike anything on offer that I begin to expect it’s not a dado rail at all.
“I think it might be architrave masquerading as dado rail,” I say to my wife in bed that night.
“I see you’ve found a new area of expertise,” my wife says. “How nice for you.”
“Do you know what dado rail is actually for?” I say.
“No, but I expect you do,” she says. “Don’t make me guess.”
“It’s to stop the backs of chairs from damaging the walls,” I say.
“Why does it go up the stairs?” she says.
“What?” I say.
“The one in the hall carries on up to the first floor. People didn’t sit in chairs on the stairs.”
“Yes they did,” I say.
“Just say you don’t know why,” she says.
“It was considered a great honour to be seated halfway up the stairs,” I say.
“I’m reading,” she says.
The next day some samples I ordered arrive, but they only confirm that our skirting has no equal. As I stare at its peculiar scrolling in profile, something occurs to me: I can just make it.
I drive to a nearby DIY superstore and buy a big tub of filler, a glue gun, some cheap pine shelving and several different lengths of dowelling and decorative trim. When I get home, I apply my electric sander to the new plaster until white dust fills the house and sets off the smoke alarm.
“Shouldn’t you be wearing a mask?” the youngest asks, materialising from the fog.
“You should be wearing a mask,” I say.
The next morning, I go back to the DIY place to buy more edging and a family pack of dust masks. I spend the rest of the day in the hall, painstakingly spanning the gap with a reconstruction cobbled from bits of wood and filler.
“You’re obsessed,” my wife says, watching me glue a length of quartered cylinder into place.
“The challenge appeals to something within me,” I say. “Something unwholesome.”
I work late into the night, and rise early to continue. In the afternoon, the youngest one finds me slumped at the bottom of the stairs, staring at the wall. “Have you just fainted or something?” he asks.
“It’s done,” I say, pointing.
“Whoa!” he says.
When our neighbour Emma drops by for a drink that evening, I make sure I’m positioned in the hall, pretending to wipe glue from my hands.
“What’s this?” Emma says.
“He just made that,” my wife says, pointing to the dado rail. “Good, isn’t it?”
“Very impressive,” Emma says.
“It’s my greatest ever achievement,” I say.
Emma looks at me. “What, greater than your marriage or your three children?” she asks.
“Unquestionably,” I say. “Look.”
“Once it’s painted over, you won’t even be able to tell,” my wife says.
These words drop like little stones into the pit of my soul – my greatest ever achievement is about to be invisible.
“Take a picture of me with it,” I say.
