Water torture
Rachel Johnson
IT WAS about ten on Saturday morning when the doorbell rang. The children were scrimmaging in our basement kitchen, the husband was in Sudan. 'Hi, it's John,' came the calm, uncluttered tones of my nextdoor neighbour, the minimalist architect John Pawson. 'We've got a slight problem. Have you got a leak?'
Not that I know of,' I answered as I buzzed him in. I guided John down into the basement past the piles of coats and scooters and old newspapers, and we started having a look-see. He told me that since the middle of the week large wet patches had been appearing on his kitchen floor.
(A footnote is called for. John's kitchen floor is almost as famous as he is. Books have been written about it; indeed, the most recent, Living and Eating by Pawson and Annie Bell, the foodie writer, is freshly out and I will return to it anon. For those of you who have been living in caves or don't read glossies, the floor in question is of handhewn stone from Lecce in Italy. As I think I have mentioned before on these very pages, each slab has the soft glow and warm patina of polished, fudge-coloured calfskin. About twice a week, photographic crews from arty magazines from Tokyo to Toronto come on shoots to worship the floor, paying it the fer vent homage of Marians at the shrine of Fatima.)
Anyhow, to return to the issue of the leak. There was nothing dripping under the sink . nothing wrong with our hot-water cylin
der .. . indeed, my whole house was dry as a bone. But then I remembered that on the previous Monday I had called out a plumber to fix a tiny spray from a pipe in our understairs cupboard, where our boiler is, and where the mains pipes connects with ours. We went outside for an inspection. There was no water issuing from under the door. But when I opened it, while it was not exactly the Poseidon Adventure in there, we could both see very clearly that there was a leak. Water was pumping forth from the very pipe that the cockney bloke in a neon van had told me was 'sorted, petal' five days before.
At this point, John's face took on the ashy hue of his grey cashmere sweater and he rushed off to tell his builders — who were apparently poised in his kitchen with sledgehammers aloft — not to break open his floor. It turned out that since Tuesday John and his wife Catherine, an interior designer, and their children had been without heat (which is cleverly plumbed into the floor, so no obtrusive ugly radiators), and since Wednesday their power and modems (also laid into the floor to avoid the hideous, tangled-cables-snaking-to-sockets look) had been knocked out by the flood. On Thursday his builders had come to try to work out what in hell was going on. Hour by hour, these dark, sodden patches were blooming on the sheeny surface of the stone, each bringing with it a stain of reddish clay and white sediment. By Saturday they were baffled, freezing, wet and ready to start lifting the vast, fossil-studded slabs. Until, that is. John knocked on my door.
Since that Saturday the state of John and Catherine's floor has been my chief concern. When friends greet me, they don't ask me how I am, what I did for Christmas or how my husband's trip to Sudan went. They ask me, shuddering with the sublime awfulness of it, 'How is the floor?' Whenever I see my neighbours — who have been more merciful and kind than you would believe possible — I ask them, 'How is the floor?' I am sometimes invited to come down and have a look, which is always an honour.
Moreover, I have found that I am compelled to flagellate myself further by poring over, and cooking from, Living and Eating, which John had given me the month before. On the one hand, this is quite normal. I love cookbooks, and this one is full of photographs of sumptuous food being prepared in the Pawsons' heavenly kitchen. On the other, the book is a constant reminder of the sheer scale of what has happened on the other side of the party wall. The floor, you see, graces not just the cover but virtually every page of the book.
'The choice of material at John's house is stone that takes its cue from the solid stone counters of the traditional salting larder and marble surfaces of the dairy,' Bell writes, in
the reverential tones that it is impossible to avoid when talking about the Pawson house. 'Chosen to be the same material as the floor, thereby minimising the number of different materials, its sheer length in the kitchen creates the feeling of a path.' That's on page 21, by the way, a double-page spread that I can hardly bear to look at because the kitchen floor — in its antediluvian state — appears more stunning than ever.
The food, though, is an even greater distraction. May I direct you to the wild-mushroom torte and the section on salad dressings? The charmoula-grilled halibut is to die for. And those pictures! You've never seen such a glorious cookbook, even if on page 18 our dirty-white VW Sharan can be glimpsed over John's shoulder as Annie assembles a goat's-cheese frittata.
It's all just too bad. Though I hardly dare ask. I think that only a couple of inches of water remain under the floor next door. As I scuttle past. I try not to look too closely. Seeing those stains makes me think not so much of carbuncles on the face of a much-loved friend as of the pox on the once flawless countenance of an international celebrity.
Living and Eating, by John Pawson and Annie Bell, Ebury Press, £25.
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