On the face of it, giving my house keys to an Albanian builder I bumped into on the street might be deemed a silly thing to do. But to those traditionalists who quibble with such a sally, I would make certain points in defence of giving a strange man called Stefano unlimited access to all areas of my life seconds after meeting him when he was repairing the windowsills of my next-door neighbour.
Stefano is special. Stefano is fixing everything. After I admired his handiwork, he offered me ‘good price’ and got to work on my sills and frames. Then he branched out. After taking a quick look at the outside of the building, he surveyed the interior, went home that evening and emailed me a quote for everything.
He itemised every single job that needed to be done, room by room, inside and out, with prices, all very reasonable, on a handy ‘how to fix your life in 35 easy stages’ type of itinerary. I’m ecstatic. I’m floating on cloud nine. My wildest dreams are coming true. I’ve been meaning to get everything fixed for about ten years.
The jobs have been piling up and I’ve been putting them off thinking ‘any day now a nice man will marry me and either take me away from all this or get his tool box out and fix it’. As each year passes and the husband does not arrive, the jobs grow ever more challenging. I’m now staring at the very real possibility that I will have to sort out a lot of this peeling wallpaper without recourse to the honourable estate of matrimony. Which is why I gave Stefano a set of keys.
He explained that a certain amount of cloak and dagger was needed for practical reasons. He can only offer me ‘good price’ by moonlighting from the company he works for. Consequently, he comes and goes at all hours of the day and night as he’s fitting in the refurbishment of my life around his other plastering jobs.
He’s often there when I get home in the evening. He’s sometimes there when I get up in the morning. I’m so pleased to see him I’m almost as polite to him as I am to my cat. No human being in my life before has elicited a cheery ‘Good morning!’ at 8 a.m., nor a caring ‘How was your day?’ at 8 p.m. I’ve never been that pleased to see anyone. But Stefano is always a sight for sore eyes. He is usually painting or hammering away at something. I can forgive him all the usual builder irritations — even the inevitable deep trouser cleavage — because he is so utterly committed to putting everything right.
He is splendidly chauvinist. The other day I offered him a cup of tea and he said, ‘Hmm. I don’t know. You make good tea?’
‘Well, I don’t know how good it is exactly, but I can certainly make it. Tea bag, boiling water…’
He looked at me sternly. He’s got me worked out. He doesn’t trust me to make him a cup of tea because he’s seen the outcome of my attempts at performing simple practical tasks. He stared up at the kitchen ceiling with pitying disdain, for example. ‘Who painted this?’ he said, grimacing.
‘I did,’ I winced.
‘I know,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You know how I know?’
‘Because it’s rubbish?’ I ventured.
He sighed. ‘Because you miss, miss, miss…’ And he pointed out where I had indeed slapped the roller around missing, missing, missing.
Every now and again he tries to work out the more existential aspects of my dilapidations. ‘Why you not married?’ ‘How long have you got?’ I asked eagerly, thinking how cosy it was going to be to tell Stefano the whole sorry story over a badly made cuppa. ‘Not long,’ he said. ‘I get on with painting.’
He’s too smart to get stuck in a conversation with me about the boy racer and all the promises he made to put a ring on my finger and share a mortgage on a six-bedroom house with underfloor heating and two sinks in the master bathroom. It would bore him rigid, as it does everyone each time I retell it.
But who cares about the boy racer when you have Stefano? Stefano has brought me more happiness in three weeks than the boy racer brought me in three years.
Which makes me realise something: all this time, I have been labouring under the assumption that I want a husband when perhaps all I ever really wanted was a reliable Albanian chap to strip wallpaper and fit alcove shelving. Happiness, I discover, is a stranger with a paint brush. If only I hadn’t wasted so much time.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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