Where there is hope

We’re back at the reclamation yard waiting for Claude and looking at the staircase we have bought for the barn. Handsome, ancient and made of oak, with wide treads and a scattering of (treated) woodworm, it is lying on its back: cleaned-up, but a little forlorn.

We bought it in June. The carpenter changed the first-floor plan in December. The landing has been extended making the rise of the staircase almost impossibly sharp. And nobody told Claude.

The change put him on the back foot and we’re still not sure how he’s going to get around it.

We’re back in the little room across from the yard office. He makes us black coffee and asks us how the building work is going.

“Not good,” explains my partner. “The bandeur put us a week behind because he had no scaffolding.”

Claude raises his hands in Gallic disbelief. “No scaffolding? A bandeur with no scaffolding? Quel bordel!”

He shakes his head, ashamed of a fellow artisan and countryman. But he gradually sees the funny side, a small smile biting at his lips.

He sympathises with us and reassures us that although the deadline is tight, it may be achievable.

He gives my partner a thick pad of graph paper. With a pen they plot out the landing, the doors; discuss balustrades and quarter turns.

Claude looks up from the blue lines. “No reason for concern,” he tells me.

Pragmatic, charismatic, he is clearly relishing the challenge. “There is a solution to every problem.”

And I suddenly stop worrying that I may never see our bedroom ever again; that once the builder has taken his ladder away, the upstairs will become another country.

“If anyone can do it, Claude can,” says my partner as we check the measurements for the umpteenth time.

And where there is Claude, there is hope.