Moreover, I had noticed he hadn’t really been designing much. The distractions of clients, legalities, staff and just generally running a busy business meant that his fellow directors and others he employed were doing the fun stuff, not him. Architects train for seven years and although they spend a fair amount of that time studying the necessary business subjects, their major skill is design. They can design anything, from a piece of furniture to a town. It’s what they’re educated to do, it’s what they learn in their lectures, what they do in all their practical projects at college and it’s what their work experience teaches them. So poor Stan – the creative stuff was out of his hands. In the constant pressure to keep sixty architects busy designing, he was having to schmooze with clients, attend endless meetings and ensure that everyone else was doing the job he would have loved to be doing himself.
I admit that the possibility of building our own house had crossed our minds before, but a long time ago when we were naive enough to think that we could find a site in London before developers got to it first. But forget it. All the bombsites from the Second World War were long gone. You might get wind of someone wanting to sell off their garden, but anyone with a garden big enough to develop will either be living in a really expensive part of London, which we couldn’t afford, or way out in the sticks. Otherwise, you could sit tight and wait for a property to come on the market that you could demolish and start afresh, but you would be old and grey and unable to hold a steady trowel before that happened.
All the best architects in the world had designed houses: Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marcel Breuer, Charles and Ray Eames. We’d seen many of them on our trips, admired them and thought, ‘Maybe one day we could…’, then we put the idea away and locked it in a box - until I raised it after twenty-five years of marriage.
The beginning
‘What do you mean, ‘Where’s my house?’’
‘You know… a house. A thing with walls and a roof. You must have seen them on your travels.’
‘Don’t be a smart-arse.’
‘Well, I just think it would be a lovely thing to do. You need a challenge. I’d love another garden. Anyway, you love the heat.’
‘Wow. Hang on a minute. What do you mean, ‘heat?’’
‘Well, surely we wouldn’t build in this country, would we? It’s grey and cold and miserable. We’d want some place in the sun.’
He looked at me wearily and dropped his eyes to his newspaper to forestall any further mention of such a preposterous idea. But I knew I’d hit his neo-cortex, that part of the brain that controls rational thought, because he went all quiet, as he does when he’s chewing over an idea. His eyes weren’t reading the sports pages, they were flitting about all over the place. I could see that the enormity of my suggestion was dawning on him and I feared that running through his mind was a dilemma of Darwinian dimension.
If we were to build:
An escape from the hurly-burly of London
A beautiful place to spend time with our children and grandchildren
A valuable inheritance for the next generation
Lots of swimming and tennis
The chance to design something from scratch
Sunshine and light
But…
The hassle of building in a foreign country
Having to learn another language
The unimaginable cost
If we decided not to build:
We could remain hassle-free and get on with our lives
But be bored and wilt.
He put down his paper and looked me straight in the eye; in that way he has of checking that I’m being serious.
‘Where?’
‘Italy!’
‘Why Italy?’
‘Well, because we love it there. I speak Italian. And the food’s sublime.’
‘But the builders are cowboys and the planning authorities are corrupt.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’m guessing,’ he said with absolute certainty and went back to his paper, indicating the conversation was over.
‘Spain, then,’ I blurted.
He hardly looked up.
‘You don’t speak Spanish.’
‘Neither do you!’
‘It would mean learning.’
‘So?’
‘So?’ he turned around, looked at me, then went back to his paper.
‘I hardly have time to fart, let alone learn a foreign language and travel backwards and forwards to Spain to supervise building works…’
‘Yes, but we could find a spectacular site and you could design a beautiful house for us and the children and our grandchildren. It would be just for us, with the big modern spaces you’ve always wanted and glass everywhere, and a big kitchen with a terrace and beautiful views across to the sea…’
I paused for breath.
‘And you could invite all your cricket chums to visit.’
He looked up without moving his head.
‘They play a lot of cricket on the Costa del Sol. You could organise a whole tour every year and everyone could stay with us. It’d be brilliant.’
Another flicker.
‘Málaga’s a really well-served airport, or Valencia or Gibraltar, and it’s so cheap to get there.’
‘But all those Brits, Kaz…’ he murmured, shaking his head.
‘So what? We’re Brits. Anyway, we could avoid them. They just swarm around the coast; we could go inland.’
‘Mmmm.’
‘Spain’s a modern country, not like Italy,’ I went on. ‘I read in the paper that every major town is going to be connected by high-speed railway so it’s no more than two hours from Madrid. And the king has said that he wants every village to have broadband. It’s a country with vision. It’s going somewhere. Look at how Spanish companies are buying up UK companies. They’re really progressive.’
He sat perfectly still. Not wanting me to see him attending.
‘And the Costa del Sol is the sunniest place in Europe. Imagine, Stan! Winter sunshine. We could spend all our Christmases out there. You would be so happy. You love the sun.’
His eyes narrowed and a millimetre of smile touched his lips.
‘We could build a tennis court and you could play all you like,’ I went on.
He was still frowning but another little light appeared in his eye.
‘We could grow old together eating black olives. The Mediterranean diet is supposed to prolong your life, you know. There are people in Greece who live to be a hundred and thirty.’
Of course, he knew that I was dredging now and that behind all my spurious arguments was the fact that I wanted another garden. And bless him, he loved me enough to humour me. After twenty agonising seconds he said, ‘All right. Let’s go and have a look. But I’m not promising anything.’
I made little fists and jumped up and down.
‘And you can organise the trips to get out there. I’m not doing it.’
‘Yes!’
With that he folded his paper and went off to the loo.
Over the next few days we drew up a spec to send to estate agents. We actually sat down and did it together. There was no bickering, no each leaving it up to the other. We did this together. We were looking for something that was:
No more than 1 hour from Málaga airport
Inland, away from the grockles, noise and urban sprawl
Blessed with great views
At least half an acre
Preferably near a nice town
Dirt cheap.
The search
During the summer of 2006 we made two or three visits to the area north of Málaga. Why not? It met our criteria. It was half an hour from the airport, inland, with nice towns and certainly cheaper than being on the coast. EU money had provided an excellent motorway going north. In fact, it runs parallel to the high-speed railway line that links Málaga with Madrid in two hours, although we’ve never tried it. After about 50 kilometres the motorway divides
into three. If you go straight on, you will reach Córdoba. Turning right takes you east towards Granada. Turning left takes you west towards Seville. But you don’t need to go that far north from Málaga town to reach the most beautiful countryside.
As you climb north from Málaga, you are following the downstream route of the Guadalmedina River that carves through the Montes de Málaga Natural Park. Rising several metres with every kilometre your ears begin to feel the pressure, you start winding through tunnels and the land gets sparse and prickly. Turning off the motorway you’re hit immediately by the spectacular views across the limestone Axarquia Mountains that hang above you, haunting and mysterious. Why they turn pink at certain times of the day and green at others no one knows. And they’re high, very high, up to 2,000m, above the tree line, capped by snow in the winter months. This is the upland region with its white hilltop villages, some of them over 1,000m high, separated by deep shady valleys, carved by rivers (arroyos) that run dry in the summer and reappear in the winter. Each visit, on returning to these stunning mountains, took my breath away. Some people love to be by the sea; I love to be in the mountains. Stan was similarly impressed. Although we hadn’t decided where we would settle, it seemed that in these mountains we had found our little patch of heaven. It was here we would build our next home, create our next garden - and save our marriage.
Before long, the search for a site in the region took on a semblance of routine. Janey, the estate agent, would send us details of what she thought were suitable properties by email; usually a hotchpotch of possibilities, some frightful, some OK. We would choose the ones we wanted to visit. She would meet us at the airport in her 4x4 (essential for the many unpaved roads she would take us on). We’d become tourists, making jaw-dropping noises as we drove around the stunning mountains viewing the chosen sites. After several trips we’d got to know the area pretty well, trampled over many derelict properties, driven through numerous new housing estates in development zones, scratched our heads trying to imagine what one could build on already-poured concrete foundations, peered through windows of abandoned houses and over walls of ruins. We seemed to be looking at a ridiculously wide variety of possibilities. Some sites were virgin, empty, flattened and waiting, some had been started and abandoned, some had buildings on them we would need to demolish. But after several visits, nothing we’d seen had appealed enough for us to make an offer. At the back of our minds was still the hope that we would find a virgin site to build from scratch.
At the end of each day’s hunting we would retire to a bar, order a couple of San Miguels and some tapas and reflect on our discoveries. Rather than a rave about the fantastic potential of what we’d seen, these sessions were turning into a morose autopsy of what we didn’t like and why we didn’t like it. We were beginning to run out of ideas and as a result, I believe, our standards dropped. We suggested to Janey that she could be a bit more adventurous in what she showed us and so we began looking at existing fincas (farmhouses), barns, townhouses and plots with limited views, none of which had been in our original spec.
Finally, in the autumn of 2006, we saw a property that was further from the airport than we wanted, nowhere near a nice town, with a ruin on it that would have to be demolished and with views down only one side of the site. We foolishly told Janey that we’d take it. After months of nursing our hopes, she seemed relieved.
‘Good,’ said Janey herding us back into the car. ‘So that’s settled.’
I could see that Stan was looking over his shoulder at the site as we left, trying valiantly to think of how he could design something that had only one set of views, pointing east. Maybe build it into the side of the mountain like the cave houses we’d seen in Guadix. He didn’t look happy.
‘At least we’ve found somewhere,’ I said, trying to buoy him up.
‘Mmmm.’
We piled back into the car.
Antonio, the local who’d been advising us, had noted our ambivalence. Antonio was, Janey told us, a ‘corridor’. At least I think that’s what she said. It may have been toreador, but anyway, the way she explained it made sense. Antonio’s job was to navigate a route through the local maze to help people like us find decent properties in the area. He worked through the corridors, in other words. Knowing just about everyone in the region, he kept his ears to the ground, found out who was interested in selling, approached agents like Janey who would inform people like us. His real skill, however, was keeping abreast of family feuding, changes of mind, price hikes, ancestral claims and internecine bloodbaths. A bit like a cross between a papal nuncio and one of John le Carré’s sleepers. He was an odd chap; small with piercing snake-green eyes like Clint Eastwood, the kind who listens and watches more than he talks. He seemed to know everyone’s business and history, yet he gave the impression that you’d have to pull his toenails off one by one before he’d talk.
As we headed for the motorway and back to the airport, he leaned over and muttered something in Spanish to Janey. She queried him, then nodded and swung off the road onto a narrow track.
‘Now, I know you’ve decided on the last property we saw, but Antonio says there’s one further site down here you may want to see. He’s not sure if it’s on the market; he doesn’t know much about it yet, but it might be worth a look as we’re passing. What do you think?’
‘All right,’ said Stan, ‘as we’re passing.’
His mind wandered off somewhere and we slumped into silence.
‘Just so you know,’ Janey chipped in, ‘the price hasn’t been decided yet but it is a bit larger than the sites you’ve been looking at.’
‘How much larger?’ we asked in unison.
‘To be honest, I haven’t seen it myself,’ she replied.
‘Oh, what the hell,’ Stan replied, beyond caring, ‘as we’re passing…’
The 4x4 hobbled over the ruts to get onto another track and we left the paved road behind. The landscape was now quite barren. It was late summer and the black-trunked almond trees stood to attention on the brown hills like coral on a reef. Nothing wanted to stir. Everything felt dry, brittle and jaded. So did we.
We meandered along the flat dirt track for a couple of minutes until the car began to hug the slope to our right and a vista opened up to our left with a precipitous drop beneath us. I shuffled over the seat to Stan’s side for safety, but couldn’t resist looking out across the drop. Through the heat haze I thought I could see the sea. But that was crazy: I couldn’t. It was just a wash of dark blue sky on the horizon. We were 50 kilometres from the coast. I must have been hallucinating. I reached out for my bottle of water, thinking rehydration was required.
The valleys down to our left were pockmarked. They rolled into each other, each one obscuring the one behind, building into a muted sea of dotted lumps, like a child might make a drawing of mountains. It was hard to get any sense of perspective in the glow of the evening. But as I looked across, there in the middle of this mess of brown hills a single promontory stood out. It was about half a mile away and seemed to sit at the end of a ridge. It just sat there like a down-turned teaspoon. There were valleys on all three sides and the only way to get to it was to drive along the ridge. It looked for all the world as if God had emptied a bag of sugar onto the earth and then flattened the top with his hand and laid the teaspoon on it.
‘I hope that’s it,’ I said to Stan, pointing it out.
‘Don’t be daft,’ he replied. ‘It couldn’t be. No one would choose to build there.’
‘It looks like the landing pad for a spaceship,’ I remarked.
Stan leaned over towards me to get a better look and whistled the tune from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
As we drove on we realised that the road we were following led right up onto the ridge and before we could conceal our excitement, we had crawled along the handle of the spoon and were parking right up there on the top of the bowl, with the world at our feet.
We got out of the car, not saying a word or daring to
catch each other’s eye. Separating, we walked cautiously this way and then that, over the entire plateau, looking thoughtful, peering over the edge from time to time, pondering, trying to pretend we weren’t peeing ourselves with joy. Eventually, we met up at the far south edge of the plateau, about 100m from where Janey and Antonio the Corridor stood chatting.
‘What do you think?’ I asked.
Stan swallowed hard, as if lost for words.
‘I think it’s amazing,’ he said, his eyes shining. ‘Absolutely amazing.’
He had come alive. There was a glow inside him that radiated at me.
We gazed around us at the panoramic views. Behind us to the north was the handle of the spoon we had driven across, a narrow road, rutted and dangerously steep. To the west, where the sun was beginning to head, a low, rolling valley with an animal track at the bottom followed the line of a dry riverbed. There was a ruin below us and a new house built deep in the shadow of the mountain. Above the house the dry brown gave way to a dense green, marking the boundary of the Montes de Málaga Natural Park, mostly pine forest. Moving round to the south, the valleys opened up towards the sea and the light became gentler, like an absorbent watercolour of blue washes, layering horizon upon horizon. Round to the east the valley was narrower and two or three farmhouses were built at our altitude less than a quarter of a mile away, close enough to hear dogs barking.
Stan could barely contain himself and began skipping and bouncing like a little boy, crossing this way and that, pacing around the edge of the plateau, then venturing down a bit, watching his footing on the loose scree, then scrambling back up. I realised then why I had wanted this so much. To see him excited, to catch the flame in his eyes, to hear the words ‘we could…’, ‘what about…’, ‘this would work…’, hardly able to finish his sentences, and squeezing my arm like a kid who wants an ice cream. This was what I wanted. This could be our project. This could save our marriage.
The Gardens That Mended a Marriage Page 3
