I Could Love You by William Nicholson Read Free Book Online

computer screen.
    One day Alan asked him about his work. Matt thought at first he was wanting a progress report on the new bathroom.
    ‘No, I mean, does your work interest you?’ Alan said. ‘Does it really interest you?’
    No one had ever asked such a question before. Plumbing’s nothing much, Matt knows that. What he usually says is that it suits him. Everyone has to make a living somehow.
    ‘But would you do it if you weren’t paid to do it?’ says Alan.
    There’s a question. A well-made joint in a copper pipe’s a thing of rightness. You can be satisfied by that. A well-designed central heating system with its pumps and its valves, its intersecting runs of pipes and its thermo-switches, is a perfect thing in its way, almost a living creature. The veins, the arteries, the beating heart of a home.
    ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ he says. ‘But money isn’t everything.’
    Matt hates quoting a price for a job. How can you tell how long it will take to solve the hundreds of problems that each new location throws up? It has to be done right. Cut corners and you’ll be found out. Water finds you out. Any weakness in the system, the water will worry at it until it gives way. Water always wins in the end. The job is not to hold the flow back, but to guide it. Persuade it to go the way you want it to go. You can’t say any of that to the clients. So Matt always ends up under-quoting for the job.
    ‘You’re a fool, Matthew,’ his mother says. ‘You always were. They don’t thank you for it.’
    No, they don’t thank him for it. They don’t even know. But he can’t explain to his mother. And she wouldn’t listen. She’s only repeating her lifelong complaint against his father: You let people take advantage of you.
    Alan persists.
    ‘What would you rather be doing, then? If you could.’
    There is an answer to this question, but Matt rarely gives it. People never quite know how to respond. It doesn’t fit the role they’ve allotted to him. But Alan is unusually curious.
    ‘What do you do when you stop work?’
    ‘This and that,’ says Matt. ‘Go down the shed.’
    ‘Down the shed?’
    ‘I’ve got a shed at the bottom of the garden.’
    ‘And what happens there?’
    Matt stares at his feet. Mumbles his answer.
    ‘Violins.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I work with my violins.’
    Alan is astonished. They always are. They think his mind must be too coarse, his hands too callused, to play a violin.
    ‘You play the violin?’
    ‘A little.’
    ‘But that’s wonderful!’
    His face expresses genuine delight. That’s when Matt realizes this conversation hasn’t been about him at all. So easy to forget: when people ask you a question about yourself, they’re really asking it of themselves.
    Alan is asking himself about his own work. About how much it interests him. About what he would rather be doing.
    ‘Play the violin! All by yourself! Just for the joy of it!’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Oh, how glorious!’
    An odd little conversation, that. Because Matt isn’t much of a talker he doesn’t tell Alan about the rest of his work with violins. Alan is sufficiently gratified already.
    ‘A plumber who plays the violin! I’ll have to put you in a play.’
    A horse that talks. A savage who recites Shakespeare. You could get angry over this sort of thing but what’s the point? He means well. At least he asks.
    But I’m not a plumber who plays the violin. I’m a man living my life as best as I can. I love music. I care for a sick mother. I feel trapped. I have long moments of pure joy. I’m lonely. I worry that my eyes aren’t as good as they were. I’m too easily enraged by little things. I’m growing older. I miss my dad.
    Alone in the kitchen of someone else’s house Matt drinks his mug of coffee, putting it to his lips while the bitter liquid is still so hot he can only sip. He feels the caffeine buzz in his body. All round the kitchen walls there are drawings done by Caspar, put up by Liz, his proud mother.