25
A t first Janey reacts as though she’s just walked into the TARDIS. That, more or less, is what seems to have happened.
‘Hang on,’ she says, and walks back out and in again.
Nothing has changed outside. The blinds are still drawn. The brickwork is still chipped and the pointing needs done, and the window frames are peeling.
Lowell smiles rather awkwardly. ‘Ah, yeah,’ he says.
Janey puts the bucket of puppies down, to some disgruntlement.
‘Oh, my God.’ She shakes her head. ‘Nobody in town knows about this.’
‘I . . . I quite like it like that,’ says Lowell, looking at her.
‘But . . . how?’
The space inside has been hollowed out. Where once there were, as Janey well remembers, two classrooms, three sets of toilets – boys, girls, teachers – a staff room, a cloakroom and a gym/canteen/makeshift theatre – all of that is gone.
Instead, there is one, vast space, made almost entirely of wood – there are wooden ridges along the back wall – with the side completely made of glass.
There is very little furniture: a large wooden dining table; a large fireplace glassed in; but then a full set of steps running into the eaves of the building, from which is suspended a beautiful wire and wood mezzanine, lined with bookshelves, with a vast double bed.
In the far corner on the right is an office space with a tilted desk and a large wooden storage unit for rolled-up plans.
On the other side, by the glass, is an immaculate small kitchen with a wooden bar for sitting at and looking out on to the beautiful wild garden in the fading light.
It is warm; the entire space is warm, no mean feat in a space this size in Scotland, particularly in a Victorian building that can’t be properly insulated.
As she looks closer she sees that the windows have an inner pane that double- or triple-seals them; that there are few doors, but the ones there are are heavy and sealed.
‘I couldn’t imagine this was here,’ says Janey.
He smiles politely.
‘But why do you leave the outside such a mess?’
‘I don’t think it is a mess,’ he says. ‘I think it’s normal wear and tear; it’s exactly how the house should look. I’m happy to respect the exterior and all the lives its been through. I think it’s beautiful like that. Then . . . the interior is mine.’
Janey takes off her shoes without even thinking about it, apart from a brief check in case she’s got a hole in her sock.
The floor is blissfully warm under her feet after the windy chill outside.
Felicity has made her way over to the front of the fire and, with a happy, exhausted sigh, has collapsed in front of it.
Janey feels rather like doing exactly the same thing. The puppies are meeping.
‘Well,’ says Janey. She was so proud of her own little place, she thinks now, just because she chose nice colours.
She would like to pretend not to be so impressed, and that she walks into amazing, design magazine-type homes all the time, but it’s too late – she already did a mega-TARDIS reaction, so she’s lost the cool points.
It strikes her, quite forcefully, that a man with a house this nice and all his own hair will probably be quite well-off for female company, but she squeezes the thought down.
It’s pointless. He has a house this beautiful but still, whenever he sees her, deliberately puts on the same pair of trousers.
Maybe it’s intentional, to stop her falling for him; he’s just being polite about it. That’s a very depressing thought.
‘Where were you thinking, for the wee guys?’ she says, regarding her bucket rather dolefully.
‘I was thinking outside, with the chicken wire,’ he says. ‘However . . . ’
He nods, and heads to the right-hand wall. Fitted flush into the wall are practically hidden doors: one to a laundry, one to a small bathroom, then one small larder.
‘Oh, this is why you leave all your shoes in the porch,’ she says. ‘So you don’t have to bother with stuff.’
‘I don’t like stuff,’ he says. ‘I know, it’s a cliché.’
Janey doesn’t like thinking back to how hard it was to throw out all the stuff.
All the endless bloody stuff, fighting, dividing, dwindling piles, impossible choices.
Christmas decorations, school reports; holiday albums that now seemed to be laughing at them and the mythic happy family they represented. All of it, just . . . stuff.
She turns to him, frowning. ‘But architects . . . why do you live in this beautiful house but build horrible miserable blocks for people?’ she says, in a more accusatory tone than she’d intended.
‘I don’t, not really,’ he says. ‘But I think there’s a lot to be said for high-density. We just really must get it right, which we don’t always do, but when we do . . . people like it a lot.’
‘And making everything so plain and dull?’ says Janey. ‘Like the new wing at the hospital.’ The turrets and big clock of the old-fashioned hospital are now hidden behind a big, ugly, antiseptic block of metal and glass.
‘Well, all the fiddly things you may like – stairs, and fancy doors and handles and whatnot . . . they’re just not very helpful if you’re old, or in a wheelchair, or can’t climb stairs or are visually impaired.
It really helps for access to make things as clear as possible.
Think about the iPad . . . most people think that is beautiful, and it’s as empty and clean as possible. ’
Janey folds her arms as she would really have preferred it if he didn’t have a point.
‘You didn’t do the new hospital wing, though?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen it. I know what you mean. Unfortunately beautiful buildings cost money, and it’s their responsibility to spend as little of our money as possible.’
‘Stop making good points,’ says Janey.
He leads her over to the drawing board and shows her what he’s working on. There are two large screens, one enormous, that show the project in three dimensions. A pair of round horn-rimmed glasses sit neatly at the top of the drawing board.
The screen shows a long line of tall, narrow houses with pointed grey roofs, which looked like Dutch houses lining a canal; they nestle near each other and have cubes of grey and white colour cut out of them in different places to individuate the houses, which have large glass windows that take up most of their first floor.
The effect is soothing but surprising too, the rows of houses looking pretty in the same line, but also as if each is individual just to you.
Janey can’t help but look longingly at the well-insulated glass, the heat pumps lined up, the solar panels on the roof.
She bets those houses are always cosy and toasty.
As if reading her mind, he says, ‘A-rating.’
‘That’s not possible,’ she says. ‘I thought that was a myth.’
‘What are you?’
‘D,’ she says. ‘And that’s if I fill in all the cracks with freezer bags.’
He grins. ‘Well, then.’
The pups are getting restless and Smokey is making a clear bid for freedom.
‘Alright,’ he says, and opens one of the almost invisible doors on the side wall. Beyond is a laundry with a butler sink and the original flagstone paving.
‘Oh!’ says Janey, in recognition. ‘That was the . . . ’
She is about to say cloakroom, but as she does so she realises that in fact along the far wall are a line of old-fashioned hooks, on a long stout wooden rail, just as she remembers it, now holding tea towels. He has kept them.
‘Oh, my,’ she says. ‘This is really . . . this is where I used to hang my blazer.’
He smiles.
‘I had a sticker, though. You got a sticker in case you couldn’t read your own name.’ She pauses for a moment. ‘I don’t think Jamesie Carnyne ever did learn to read his own name.’
‘Wonder what happened to him?’
‘He’s on his dad’s farm, of course. Well, his farm now. Good man, Jamesie. Not much for the reading, but he’s a good man with the coos. One year the dairy truck couldn’t get through the snow, and his dad sent him down with fresh milk for all us weans.’
‘That sounds lovely.’
‘It was terrible! All warm, with, like, bits floating in it. It gave us all the boke and we pretended we were going to be sick . . . then I think Carmel Wilson really was sick. Oh, yeah, and Mrs Hegary gave us all a row and that was it, we were in big trouble.’ She laughs, remembering.
‘Jamesie was fuming . His dad had gone to all that trouble, given away a bit of his day’s takings too, and we just took the piss. ’
He smiles to see her laughing.
‘Oh, goodness, we called him Bokie Jamesie for ages. Oh, God.’ She puts her hand to her mouth. ‘We were terrible.’
He crouches, letting the puppies squirm over his hands, dropping them when they started to nip.
‘I can’t imagine you as a naughty schoolgirl,’ he says, and Janey is suddenly conscious that the laundry room is not huge, and is very warm, with heated dryer rails – oh, the luxury – and she suddenly finds she has gone pink and begs herself not to have a hot flush, not now, of all times, please.
‘I wasn’t!’ she protests. ‘I was very well behaved!’
‘Were you a big swot?’
‘Well, I wasn’t a big enough swot to go to architect school , no,’ she says. ‘Where did you grow up anyway?’
‘St Andrews,’ he says.
‘Oh, my God, that’s swot capital of the world!’
‘Well, quite.’
‘Why aren’t you wearing a diamond-pattern jumper, in fact?’
He smiles. ‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘And your trousers should be red—’
‘Please, please can we not start on my trousers again?’
He looks around then opens a unit in the sideboard, inside of which are piled lots of towels, all a soft grey.
‘That is the most anal thing I have ever seen,’ says Janey, then regrets even referring to the ‘a’ word.
‘What, owning towels?’
‘Owning them all the same colour.’
‘Why would you own different-coloured towels? How does that make you . . . whatever.’
He obviously doesn’t want to say that word either.