The youngest one drops by because he’s going skiing with people from work, and the family accumulation of extreme weather gear still lives in a bag in our attic.
“This looks good,” he says, holding up some electric blue thermal underwear I once wore to spend the night in a snow hole.
“That’s posh,” I say. “But actually, I think I might need it.”
“Why?” my wife says. “Where are you going?”
“I need it,” I say. “For watching TV.”
Our heating still doesn’t work – the temperature inside the house is entirely dependent on the temperature outside, and the forecast for the week is ominous. When I insisted this was a problem bigger than my straightforward inability to programme our stupidly complicated thermostat, my wife threatened to seek professional help. Mark the builder’s son Alfie, she reminded me, was a central heating engineer.
“Maybe he can show you how to work the app,” she said.
“This is not an app thing,” I said. “This is real.” But I was not confident.
My wife made a call, and found that Alfie was on a job nearby – he could drop round in the late afternoon. I spent the rest of the day trying to summon heat using the app, but the radiators stayed cold. I prepared myself for humiliation.
But then Alfie came round, felt the radiators, checked the thermostat, took the cover off the boiler, and provided me with instant vindication.
“Your pump’s gone,” he said.
“Aha!” I said, the smile fading from my lips as I began to calculate how much this sense of satisfaction was going to cost me.
It is now Sunday night. A new pump is ordered for Monday, and I am preparing to let my blue thermal underwear go.
“Fine, take it,” I say. “I’ll watch TV wrapped in newspaper.”
“Thank you,” says the youngest one.
When I wake on Monday morning, there is a hard frost on the ground, and on the inside of the windows.
“This is unbelievable,” I say, lowering the duvet only as far as my chin.
“Alfie is delayed,” my wife says, looking at her phone. “He’s not coming until midday.”
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll get out of bed at midday.”
But I have work to do. By 9am I am in my office shed, which I used to complain about on cold winter mornings, but now seems like a spa compared with the living room. I sit at my desk in my coat, blowing on my hands and occasionally looking back toward the kitchen to see if Alfie has arrived. The youngest one sends me his plane ticket to print out. I think: I wish I was going to the Alps, with my underwear.
Around midday I look across to the kitchen and see the boiler cupboard door open, and one of Alfie’s boots sticking out from behind it. I think: best to let him get on with it. An hour later, I wander inside.
“How’s it going?” I say.
“Fine,” Alfie says, from inside the cupboard. “Just a bit of a faff.” The new high efficiency pumps, he explains, won’t just slot into the old pump housing – the whole thing has to come off.
“Typical,” I say, already on thin ice.
‘Yeah, but we’re gettin’ there,” he says. “System’s refilling now.”
“Oh good,” I say. I’d like to hear more, but it’s too cold to hang around.
I return to my office. An hour passes. Then another. Every time I look into the kitchen, I can see the boiler cover leaning against the table, and the cupboard door still open. Surely, I think, he must be finished by now.
It’s long past dark when I go back to the house. The cover is back on the boiler, but the shelves that had been removed to gain access are still stacked on the floor. The air in the kitchen has the sharpness of a cold storage unit. I find my wife in her office.
“Um, so,” I say.
“There was a problem,” she says.
“Now it’s colder than it was before,” I say.
“Air in the system, or a blockage, or both.”
“I thought there was more than one thing wrong,” I say. “But it’s more than two things.”
“He looked a bit bewildered,” she says.
“That’s bad,” I say. “Like when you see panic on the face of a flight attendant.”
“Anyway, he was very apologetic, and he’s coming back tomorrow morning.”
When I reach the bottom of the stairs the cat and the dog are staring up at me as if I have reneged on some ancient bargain of animal domestication: you keep it warm in here, and we won’t eat you.
“Don’t worry,” I say, putting on another layer to watch TV. “He’s coming back tomorrow.”
