The Handyman by Jenny Steel

Read the winning entry in our 2007 short story competition

The Handyman by Jenny Steel

Stella was, is, my first born and now only child. Since her father's death, she has chosen to monitor my well being via weekly phone calls, a chore made easier by the knowledge that I am, as I have always been, “fine”. Any suggestion of inadequacy would threaten our mutual independence.

For my part, I choose to answer her calls and her questions while in the security of my sitting room, a space pleasing to my eye, made comfortable by my own hand, echoing as it does the colours and patterns of the garden.
It was from here that I chose to let her know of the small change I had made to my circumstances.

“Oh, by the way, dear, I've found a handyman at last.”
Silence.
“What do you mean 'found'?”
“Usual channels – you know, word of mouth.” I lied, thinking of him standing on my doorstep, holding the postcard that had long been pinned on the post office board.
“What about references?”
I had named her Stella in the hope of liberating her from the conventional family mould, but at forty she was still, as she had always been, a disappointingly pedantic child.
“Immaculate.” For this was how I assessed my own judgement of the man who had presented himself.

Dressed in the colours of the earth and seasons, his tweed jacket, moleskin trousers and working shirt were of stiff material, grown comfortable with age, as indeed had he. Ash-handled tools, patinated with use and care, arranged in a roughened leather pannier were eloquent in their recommendation of this working man.

“Where does he come from?”
I suppressed the desire to shock with a literal truth.
“He's local. I've seen him around. He rides a bicycle. Oh, and another thing – it could be an advantage…” I had thought about attempting a light laugh, “… he doesn't speak… or hear.”

With my free hand, I twisted a wilting blossom from the pale pink cyclamen on my writing table. Responding mechanically to the expected, blustering cautions, I recalled to mind the few fluttering and cupping movements of his huge hands with which he had conveyed his silent world.

“I promise you that it is not a problem. We can communicate very well.”
And so it was that Joseph Jones came into my life.
Our contract was set in accordance with the few terms I had suggested on the postcard.

Each Tuesday and Thursday he would arrive promptly at 9.30am and work as needed in the house or garden for three hours. He was to be paid by cheque each week. Extra expenses to be covered in cash.

Having myself a distaste for either receiving or handing out payment, I decided it would be mutually most comfortable to carry out our commercial transactions as indirectly as possible. The due amount was to be placed in an envelope and left in a small tray in the greenhouse. Any requirements that either of us had were to be noted on a pad hung by the door.

I came to enjoy writing “Mr J Jones” on the fibrous brown envelope I had selected as appropriate. Although I checked each day, several weeks passed before I finally received a request – for raffia, “which I can supply if you wish. Price £2.39.”

He wrote using a gardener's pencil, soft and dark. The letters were each clearly formed and flowing with a regular angularity. I found myself tracing their path.
“Thank you, Mr Jones. Please supply.” Then I added, “I too prefer raffia.”

He was, as I expected, a most competent and reliable worker. I rarely had to indicate a job that needed attention. Peeling paintwork, loose screws, dripping taps were spotted and remedied without comment. He seemed able to gentle the earth into a soft tilth, easing the path of tender plants so that they lowered earlier and with greater vigour than I remembered. I knew that this was fanciful, but the notion pleased me. I soon began to feel a comfort in his regular coming and going and in watching him work at each task with quiet persistence.

There was about him an independence of attitude, an assuredness of manner, with nothing of the subservient. He was clearly unimpressed by machines, the aids to my self-sufficiency, acquired on well-meaning advice. I could not resent that, without reference to me, he consigned the expensive motor mower, the strimmer, the leaf blower and shredder to the shed and hauled out equipment and machines long forgotten.

He must have worked on these in his own time, cleaning and sharpening, oiling and setting, until they were fitting companions for his own cherished tools.
I am not such a fool that I did not recognise that I was becoming mesmerised by my enigmatic handyman, but, truthfully, it was not imagination that the cut grass smelt sweeter when mown by a clicking, purring cylinder. There were no more angry sounds of demented disciplining. Mr Jones, Joseph, had brought something of his own silence to my garden.

Of course there were problems.

In the early days, I made an effort to learn the hand shapes of the alphabet, trying to grasp the basics of signing. I hoped to surprise him as I began to combine my fingers and hands to form G… O… O… D… The effect was as if I had slapped him. Very gently he placed one large hand over mine and held it still, then stepping back, almost in apology, he raised his hand, palm tilted towards me, long, loosely jointed fingers outspread. In exaggerated slow motion, he nodded his head to the right, and gave me the accustomed smile of greeting that he and I both understood.

I recall one particular day. It had been raining – big coins of rain that seemed to kick up the smell of earth. Joseph – I had started to call him Joseph by then – was working in the greenhouse. He loved the build-up of warmth in there and used it almost as a workshop. Although his back was towards me and the door was closed, as clear as the song of the blackbird, I heard whistling, and in the sweet, squeezed notes, I recognized the distinctive pattern of tunes and rhythms from my youth.

The beaker of coffee I had brought for him was almost too hot for my hands, but I cupped it against me, and moving like a predatory cat, sought to prolong the moment and savour the sound. Sweet tendrils of honeysuckle curved over the glass, obscuring the corner, but as I inched onto the shingle surround, the slightest shift of movement was enough to make him aware of my presence.
The whistling stopped. He stood and half turned, as straight as the low angled panes would allow, looked straight at me, gave a broad, all-embracing smile and the exaggerated bow of a performer. The coffee became an accepted tribute and I mimed my applause, and the moment to question had passed.

There was too a misunderstanding over my beloved black elder. Its untrammelled, searching growth had lifted the fragrant pink blossoms beyond my reach, threatening my summer wine production. I wanted him to tidy it, to take the long growth and use the withes as a frame for sweet peas. By chance, I first heard and then saw him lopping through old twisted, varicose branches, exposing the heartwood.

“Stop! Joseph! MISTER Jones, what the hell are you doing?” I knew that I was shrieking.

He spun round, losing his balance on the old apple ladder. The lopper fell forward and he attempted to catch the open blade. Across the pink palm of his hand, a deep gash opened. We watched in horror as crimson blood began to surge from the wound. Instinctively, I tore a towel from the washing line, ripped it into strips and pressed a pad to the flow. His fingers closed over mine increasing the pressure until the flow had been staunched, but not before his blood had seeped between my fingers. Overwhelmed by relief and moved by tenderness, I raised the stains to my lips, and he touched my shoulder, understanding.

I drove to the hospital. The 20-odd miles – penalty of country living – had never threatened to be longer. It was the first time that we had shared so intimate a space and I became intensely aware of his presence. We could each breathe the other, aware of the smoke of a bonfire, smells of cooking and creosote, leather, wax polish and rosemary… skin… hair. Neither of us looked at the other, but the contact, the comfort, was palpable.

He wanted to go in alone. There was no doubt of his need for Accident and Emergency treatment, and I had no qualms about his ability to communicate. With the same protective obsession of a mother at the school gate, I watched him walk towards the white doors. Anxious that others should not rush to wrong judgement, I tried to see him with objective eyes, noticing for the first time the slight bandiness of his long legs. A tall man, loose limbed, I liked the suggestion of awareness in the way he inclined his back, or perhaps – I tried to be realistic – it was a stoop of age. If I tried to recapture the first impression I had formed, I would say that he was functionally kempt – his close cropped grey hair, neat like an astrakhan cap. I felt almost proudly possessive as, with his usual gentleness of manner, he stood aside and held the door to aid another patient. For this is what he was – a patient man.

But I am not a patient woman. I tensed to move each time the exit doors slid open, ready to claim him. Unable to sit any longer, I got out of the car at the same time as he came out.

My concentration had been so total that I did not notice the Gaylord sisters approaching. They had grown more like twin walruses than ever, wrapped in shiny black, pendulous bodied, bullet headed and, I swear, with visible moustaches.

“Betty. Betty Preston!” they honked in unison, swaying towards me.
I hurried Joseph towards the car.

“We heard you'd got a man. But nobody told us…” Their beady eyes flashed, exchanging arch looks, jowls wobbling, raising wide nostrils to sniff the air, heads weaving together, apart, in choreographed movement. Then they looked in wonder directly at Joseph and extravagantly mouthed the unspeakable words…
“HE'S… BLACK!”

I took Joseph's arm and opened the passenger door, controlling my venom.
“Oh really. How wonderful. I hadn't noticed. And you may be interested to know that Mr Jones is in fact deaf. But he is not blind.”

I knew that Joseph must have seen their reaction, and I was incensed, furious on his behalf. He felt my anger but did not seem to share it. Instead, he cupped his uninjured hand first across his mouth, then against his eyes and then against his ear and I recognised his mimed philosophy of speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil. But I knew only too well what pleasure would be taken by those who lived by a more vitriolic code.

Stella's phone call came that evening, even more promptly than I had expected.
“I'm coming to see you.”
Could I possibly guess why? Usually she said, “I'll come and see you some time. Or you must come to us, when we are less busy.”
“I'm coming on Thursday morning.”
Surprise, surprise. Any contribution from me was obviously superfluous. My compliance was assumed.

In spite of his injured hand, Joseph was working in the garden when she arrived, tapping vine eyes into the wall, preparing to train the old clematis into better ways. I wished he could have had the same influence on my daughter.
I watched him through the kitchen window while Stella clattered dishes and nosed into cupboards, her high heels irritating on the tiled floor. All the time she was talking, hectoring. It was the brittle tone of exasperation that she assumed to indicate to me, to the world, that she cared.

“I will have my say. You may have forgotten that this was my father's house.”
My home.
“What would he say?”
Very little to me – he never did.
“What about the neighbours?”
What neighbours? Old friends had all moved, were dead, or in care homes. Incomers, weekenders led different lives.

She was generating her own steaming resentment. Her words were such bitter anathema to me that I shut them out, and focused only on what I found pleasing, gentle. I looked at Joseph.

“What do you pay him?”
Not enough, not nearly enough. Her very presence was making me adhere ever more strongly to Joseph. I would pay him more. Ask him to work longer hours… more days.
“And what is all this rubbish about him being deaf?”
I'm listening.
“The Gaylords spoke to Lizzie Frame. Her daughter works in casualty and she said categorically, CATEGORICALLY, that he spoke just like everyone else. He was able to tell the doctor what happened, AND he heard his name called and could understand everything they said to him.” She chose to emphasise her words by banging a metal spoon on the old wooded table, careless of dents, inflicting her damage.

My lack of response was no longer stubborn wilfulness. I was stunned. The pain that flared in my stomach ripped into my heart, and took all breath from my body.

“Now will you get rid of him? He has lied to you.” The final blow.
She and I both recognised her victory.
My eyes could no longer focus. Like my brain, they had become bleary. Joseph had become the prop to my world and he was to be taken away. I was again to be bereft.

I responded with the words and the voice of a stranger.
“I will speak to him. You are right. If he has… misled… me… But not today.”
As Stella perceived me, I felt myself to be – a vulnerable, silly old woman, prey to any self-seeker, victim of my own foolishness.

The next time that Joseph was working in the greenhouse, his territory, concentrating on pricking out seedlings, I stood a little away from the door.
“Mr Jones, please will you come into the house. I wish to speak to you,” and I turned away, steeling myself to composure.

I chose to see him in my sitting room. He was conscious of his working clothes, unwilling to sully the pale colours. My insistence over-rode the awkwardness and he sat. The truth was that, even in my hurt, I could not allow him a cap-in-hand demeanour.

“Why, Joseph? Why should you deceive me?”
Was I expecting shame, explanations, apologies?
He looked at me steadily. And then he spoke: “When I came to you, we agreed a contract.” His voice was soft, the consonants blurred, the vowels elongated into a rhythm that lulled. He pulled my old postcard from his pocket.
“These were your terms, and these…” He again simulated a word of silence with his cupped hands… “were mine.”
I was stunned by the ingenuousness of the man. He forestalled my response.
“I came to you, as I have come to many ladies, to help with odd jobs. This is my contract. What is it that makes these ladies think that because they have paid for my time, they have bought my mind? Mrs Preston, have you any idea of how some of these ladies can talk? Forgive me, Mrs Preston, but a man has to protect himself from the prattling of women.”

I thought of the Gaylords. I thought of Stella in full flow, and I remembered, to my shame, my own strident command. I knew his thoughts matched mine, but there was humour in his eyes as he said, “You, my dear Mrs Preston, are not a prattling woman.”

I took the postcard from him, picked up a soft pencil, 3B as I remember, and added: “Good Sense of Humour absolutely essential. Must be able to whistle Stardust”.

So Joseph stayed, splashing my muted garden with the vibrance of canna lilies, and we drank the elderflower wine, and my world felt good again, listening to the garden, and speaking volumes.
My, how that man can talk!

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