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round. Why should animals be presumed to be humble?
    Matt listens when others talk, and offers no contribution, because he does not regard his view of things as having any status. He does not have the habit of opinions. But he is not humble. He nurses a deep and steady contempt for shoddy workmanship and processed food, for television game shows and politicians who tell people what they want to hear and newspapers that tell lies and credit cards that enable you to buy what you can’t afford and computers and the Internet. ‘I don’t bother with all that,’ he says.
    To be sure of providing a decent flow he needs to steal at least fifty millimetres at one end or the other. He can raise the toilet bowl, but this will leave a ridge in the floor in the middle of the room. Therefore the soil pipe must drop fifty millimetres lower at the outer end, which means it will cut through the ceiling of the room below. This is the boy’s bedroom.
    Matt pads down the stairs to the floor below, which is the second floor. He makes as little noise as possible, even though he’s alone in the house. In the nature of his work he’s often alone in people’s houses. They give him a key, tell him to let himself in, lock up when he leaves. Everyone works such long hours these days. Alan in London for a meeting on his film script. Liz in Folkestone working on an article about Saga cruises. Matt knows these things because he has heard them speaking to each other. He has no wish to eavesdrop but they forget you’re there, or maybe they think you don’t understand, like a household pet. Down the years he has overheard quarrels and anger, bitterness and tears. Very little joy, very little love. You wonder why people stay together when you hear the ways they set out to hurt each other.
    Alan and Liz aren’t so bad. They have a six-year-old boy who Liz spoils because she’s out at work so much. There’s a girl too, who’s away at university. When Alan accuses Liz, saying, ‘Cas loves you best because you always give in to him,’ Liz replies, ‘Well, Alice loves you best, so we’re evens.’ It’s only a kind of joke between them, except that jokes are real.
    He enters the second-floor back bedroom and studies the section of the ceiling which will have to be cut away for the soil pipe. It will get in the way of nothing, of course, but the sloping box will look ugly and intrusive. Matt’s aesthetic sense is driven by a strong view on what is fitting. In a corner, between wall and ceiling, a box section would be fitting. In the middle of the ceiling it would be a bodge. And yet it can go nowhere else.
    The trick, thinks Matt, is to make a box section in just that position be as necessary to the little boy’s bedroom as it is to the bathroom above. Suppose he evens out the boxing to make it run parallel to the ceiling, and takes it right across from wall to wall: it would then look as if it was a central beam, a part of the structure of the ceiling. But it isn’t a beam. This offends another of Matt’s instinctive rules. You don’t make things pretend to be something they’re not.
    I could drop the whole ceiling by fifty millimetres, he thinks. But what do you do with the void? Mice will nest there and eat the plastic coating off the electric cables, and there’ll be the devil’s own job to get back in there and sort it out. You have to think about access. You have to think about the poor sod who gets called out ten years from now to fix a leaking pipe or a fused circuit. It’s a matter of pride; and Matt Early is a proud man.
    No point in rushing it. This next stage requires thought. So he goes all the way down to the basement kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee. When he started the job he brought his own Thermos, but Alan said, ‘Use the kitchen.’ Then Alan would hear him going downstairs and would emerge from his study to join him, welcoming a little company while the kettle boiled. A lonely job, sitting all day in front of a