Three Dont Tango 22

The inspectors come round and look at the house. They push the door jambs, they thump the floors, and inspect the drains. "No, we cant give you your grant money yet because you haven't finished," they say.
"What do I have to do to finish?"
"Cover in the bath, cover the walls with wallpaper, or paint, and...." They give me a list of eleven things still to be done.
"This is getting me down, Ann. I've been sweating my guts out for nearly a year on this building now, and I'm thoroughly sick of the whole thing."
"But darling, you're nearly finished."
I cant stand the way it is hanging round my neck. I want to breathe. I want to be able to wander around, stay in bed, go for a holiday, dream. Instead I get up at seven in the morning and start work. I am working till Annabel gets up, when I stop for half an hour to eat breakfast. I work again until lunch time; stop for half an hour; then work till tea-time; stop for half an hour; then work till supper time, and stop for half an hour.
Then Annabel goes to bed, and I carry on working until two a.m. Next morning I am up again at seven. I do this for a month, seven days a week.
I fall into bed filthy. I sleep like a stone. I get up. I start work again. I am a zombie. My head aches. My eyes hurt. My arms hurt. I am sore all over and my back is painful no matter what position I work, sit or sleep in. But after the first week is over and I have finished the major jobs I feel I am winning.
Annabel comes along behind me. As I finally finish a room she sweeps up, puts down the carpets, and hangs the curtains she has been making. Our home is beginning to look like a proper home. The dirt and dust is gradually retreating. The kitchen becomes permanently clean at long last, and the red cord curtains go up, and at night the room looks cosy and warm. The rayburn roars away, and the standard lamp is ringed with tassels hanging from the new curtain material she has bought for the drawing room.
Gradually the children's bedrooms are painted, and their curtains go up. Bookshelves are screwed into the walls, and at last the kids have somewhere to put their things. Annabel cuts pictures from magazines and plasters them in a tight fitting collage across the chimney breast.
Then she gets an idea. She takes her latest canvas into Mini's room and sits and paints a section from the collage. There is the head of Jimi Hendrix, a small foetus, a lady looking somewhat harassed and smoking a cigarette, an aeroplane on the tarmac. She paints everything into squares which are defined by lengths of cotton thread drawn across the painting and tacked into the frame at the sides. The painting is all done in black and white.
We have just been to London and seen an amazing exhibition by a Catalan painter by the name of Genoves. His style is derived from the movies. There are frames painted one after the other of the same scene. The one painting looks like a collection of stills from a news reel. There are crowds running, aircraft zooming in on targets, people up against walls. They are paintings of paranoia in the traditionally paranoid Spanish style, and they have an immediate stark reality, helped by the fact they are painted in black and white.
It has been a long time since we have been so impressed by such strong images, and now Annabel has discovered you can paint pictures from photographs, and you can stick bits of photographs together and then paint the resultant composition, and then tear the painting and stick it back together in a different way.
Today she is painting collages in black and white, and dividing the painting into sections by stretching cotton across the canvass.
Mini is two now. She waddles across the room to the front door. She stands on tiptoe and points to the bottom section of the new painting. "Baby," she says. The finger stabs again, and she looks round at us smiling. "Baby."
I find it intriguing that she recognises a picture of a three month old foetus. The recognition appears to be instant, and the identification with the subject is for her exciting. She looks at it every time she comes in and goes out. Sometimes as she goes past she takes a stocky finger from her mouth and points to the foetus, smiles, and walks on. Has she made a pact? Has she said 'Hello?'
We don't furnish the drawing room. It is early march, and the room is cold. I still have to put in a fireplace. We decide to move in only when the summer comes, and so it stands at the end of the house, large and bright, and very chilly.
At last the men from the planning department return, and walk round.
"Yes?"
"No. You must fill in the gaps at the back. The stone work on the northern side of the house cant be left in that state."
Another two days work. I am depressed, but after all, the work-load is now reduced to the last, the very last..... is it really the last job?
At the end of the week I ring the office. They don't bother to come out again. The house is officially finished, and we have our grant money to pay back the bank loan.
Now we can live in our house. Now I can sit in my study and write, knowing that I don't have to lay another brick upon another brick unless I actually choose to do so. Of course, I fancy making a pergola at the front with wistaria climbing up the posts. That's straight forward. That shouldn't take long.
I fancy adding a porch at the back. That may take me a week to do. Then there's the grisly business of putting in a large fireplace, and enlarging the existing chimney. God knows how long that will take. And when the summer comes round there will be the greenhouse and the swimming pool to construct.
But right now I have the whole of the month of april in which to relax!

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