Half an hour later, they were sitting in the lounge, Win’s leg resting on an upturned bucket, a bag of frozen peas, borrowed from Flavia next door as their freezer was still in storage, clamped to his knee, as Gavin, Stavros their architect, the plumber and the electrician loomed over them.
The news was not good. Zoe should have been used to that by now. The work was going to take much longer and cost much more than they’d originally thought. Apparently, it wasn’t until you started knocking down walls and prising up floorboards that a whole host of other problems showed up; a leaking pipe underneath the bath, dry rot, cracks in the back wall.
Sitting next to him, Zoe could tell that Win had tensed every muscle to try and ward off the pain. You should never ignore pain. Pain was an alarm signal. The body’s way of telling you that something was seriously wrong. The last time Zoe had been in pain, she’d ignored it and nearly died.
‘Win, you really should go to hospital. Have an X-ray at the very least.’
Win frowned. ‘Shhh.’
Zoe didn’t appreciate his peremptory tone, not in the slightest, but she shh-ed so they could move on to discussing why the original radiators weren’t fit for purpose.
‘It’s the valves, you see. Not compatible, they’ll never pass a safety check…’ The plumber was rambling on. Zoe mentally added another five thousand to their running tally though she didn’t have an earthly clue how much radiators cost.
Win clenched his fists and made a strange sound like he was about to come to the boil. Zoe knew that sound though she’d only ever heard it the once before when Ed and Win had had an argument over whether to invite their father to the christening of Ed and Juliet’s firstborn.
It had been the only time in thirteen years that Zoe had seen Win lose his temper and now she counted to ten but only got as far as six when Win kicked the bucket out from under his leg, then howled in pain before he howled in rage.
‘For fuck’s sake! We’ve been here two months and the place looks worse than when we moved in! Why don’t we have a boiler yet? We need hot water! We need a shower! We’ve spent thousands of pounds already and I still can’t have a hot shower!’ He was shouting. Win never shouted, yet now he was. He swung round to glare at Gavin. ‘You should have said that the radiators were absolute lemons!’
‘It’s not really Gav’s fault, Win,’ Zoe said, even though Gavin was entirely unruffled, when actually Zoe wanted him to be completely ruffled and appreciating the hideous, expensive enormity of the situation.
‘I did try several times, but what do I know? Only been in the building game for forty years.’ Gavin sniffed in a martyred fashion. ‘But you obviously know better than I do, Win, as you’re such an expert in how I should do my job.’
Win hissed in fury or agony, Zoe couldn’t tell which, and Stavros stepped forward. ‘I know this is stressful and we haven’t moved as fast as we’d have liked but that’s the problem with these old houses,’ he said calmly. ‘Win, please sit down. You look like you’re about to drop.’
‘I’m fine,’ Win insisted, staying rooted onto the spot in the middle of their crummy living room in the crummy house that was going to bankrupt them if it didn’t kill them first. ‘Actually, I’m not fine. There was a plan. We talked about it! We agreed to the plan and then you just ignored it and did what you wanted without any thought for the consequences. But if you had stuck to my plan, stayed on schedule, then we wouldn’t be in this mess. Christ! I don’t know why I even bother!’
‘Just listen to yourself, Win! Life doesn’t work to your plans and schedules. Sometimes stuff, awful stuff, just happens.’ Zoe was crying when seconds before she’d been dry-eyed. Win’s words had cut into her like the surgeon’s blade. He’d had a plan. Zoe hadn’t followed the plan and it had made an absolute mess of her, of them. And maybe that was why tears streamed down her face. She choked as she tried to get her words out. ‘I know that everything’s ruined. I know that!’ she sobbed. ‘And there’s no way to make it better.’
She wasn’t talking about the house but Gavin put his arm around Zoe and told her not to worry and that he’d once had a fifty-something investment banker lie on the floor and bawl his eyes out over the wrong kind of porcelain tiles. Only Win didn’t react but sat back down in the deckchair (because their lovely comfortable chairs were still in storage), frozen peas on his knee, eyes fixed at some point in the middle distance.
He was stuck in the same pose, hours later, as they sat in A&E at the Whittington, waiting for his name to be called, while Zoe cried. She just couldn’t stop crying.
‘We can’t go on like this,’ Zoe managed to say at last, when the sobs had died to a dull roar and she was trying to mop up the stem of tears with a ratty tissue. ‘We have to talk about what happened. We have to get through this, otherwise we were never as good, never as strong, as we thought we were. This has to change.’
Win turned to her, his face as bleak as the sky in winter. ‘Then make it change, Zo. Think of something, because I am all out of ideas.’