The renovations were too much for me. I had to get the builder boyfriend back. But before you call me weak, manipulating, cheap, pathetic, or (if you’re into American self-help books) co-dependent, just hear me out. I defy anyone to go through what I went through with a consignment of ill-fitting MDF and not make a panic-stricken phone call to an ex-boyfriend who happens to be a building contractor.
And it’s not as if I rekindled the relationship entirely in order to get my house halfway back to habitable. I missed him. I missed his funny south London builder ways. I missed his deafeningly loud laugh, his tousled, blond, dust-filled hair, his weather-beaten face and soulful blue eyes. I missed the way he wears T-shirts when it’s minus four.
I even missed his argumentative black cab driver-style rants over dinner about how the country is going to the dogs: ‘Here’s me working like a mug on a freezing roof all day when you can sign on the dole and get everything for free and a car thrown in. It’s no good. Britain’s finished.’ And so on and so forth.
I don’t know if this means I love him, but I think it probably means something. It definitely meant that when I came home one day to find a catastrophic error with the fitted wardrobes in the master bedroom and could take no more of this renovating business as a single woman, the ex-builder boyfriend was my first port of call.
‘Don’t worry about it, we’ll sort it,’ he said when I explained that the Albanians had built an elaborate four-door cupboard right up to the window frame leaving no room to hang curtains, and were refusing to dismantle it. Even when I cried they refused. Even when I made the special howling sound they said there was no way they were going to change it. It was my fault, apparently, because I should have specified that I wanted a window frame with space to hang curtains, and that as things were I would just have to content myself with a roller blind.
‘A roller blind?’ I said, much as Lady Bracknell said ‘A handbag?’
The ex-builder boyfriend turned up that evening in his battered pick-up truck, the back of which had a new and impressively butch dent. His hair was looking particularly dust-filled and tousled.
He strode into the main bedroom and surveyed the wardrobe. ‘Don’t worry. We can sort this. You need to tell them to break it up here…support it here…then take a piece out of it with a jigsaw and push it this way…’
‘They say they can’t do that. They say the whole thing is totally impossible to change and that the only thing they can do is rip it out and start again which will take four days and an extra £3,000.’
‘That’s rubbish. You tell them you won’t pay until they shorten it. Builders only say they can’t do something until you stop the money.’
The next day I repeated my demands to Stefano with the added information about the money running out and, hey presto, he suddenly discovered that he could take a piece out of the wardrobe.
The ex-builder boyfriend and I celebrated with a slap-up dinner at our favourite Indian restaurant in Tooting. He told me all his latest anecdotes illustrating that the country was going to the dogs and whilst his social theories were no more scientific than I remembered them, they were jolly entertaining. He then insisted on paying and tipped the waiter £20, more than the cost of the meal.
Why, exactly, did I decide a few months ago that this paragon of rough-hewn virtue wasn’t the best thing that has ever happened to me? I can’t remember. There was some issue about something or other…No, it’s gone. Whenever I try again with an ex, I’m like a woman who gives birth then immediately forgets the agony.
Also, I don’t take my own advice. I told a friend a few weeks ago not to get back together with her ex-husband just because she has to go into hospital for a hip replacement. Terrified, she wanted him to come and look after her while she was recuperating and so was considering a speedy reconciliation timed to coincide with her op.
I cautioned strongly against this. ‘Then you’ve got a problem worse than a dodgy hip. You’ve got a dodgy hip and your annoying ex-husband back in your life.’
‘You’re right,’ she said, and hired a professional carer for the four weeks she will be laid up.
Meanwhile, I’ve got a wonderful fitted wardrobe which stops in just the right place for my beautiful beige curtains to be draped with matching tie-backs. But I also have an ex ex-boyfriend. Ho hum.
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