I Beatrice

18 March 2007
Day Two: A road runs through it


I’ve been ‘out there’ almost twelve hours now, and so far, nobody has commented. I daresay I ought to have expected as much, and should be patient. But then, suppose nobody were to comment? Not one person. Not ever. It would be very disgraceful, wouldn’t it? The blog equivalent, so to speak, of nil points in the Eurovision Song Contest! Still, nil desperandum and all that: the only thing seems to be blithely to go on, as if one thought that someone, somewhere must be listening……

To return to the story so far, therefore, and tell you that what the road of the title actually runs through is our house, my brother Bill’s and mine. Though strictly speaking it isn’t so much a road, as a little public footpath. It was once one of the approach avenues to the local stately home: a great, gaunt Jacobean mansion that stands in splendid isolation on the river bank, about a hundred metres from here. The house looks abandoned now, for all the world as if it were peopled only by unfriendly ghosts – though I’m told by my friendly butcher (he being the one person who has so far addressed more than three words to me) that a very old lady and her daughter still live there. The same old lady, the butcher tells me, around whom some ancient scandal was enacted, years ago in my remote girlhood. It seems an unlikely story. That particular old lady would be about a hundred by now! It would be rather like suddenly discovering that Wallis Simpson was still alive. Or Nell Gwynne, or Queen Victoria. It has excited my curiosity however, and I look forward to learning more. Just as soon as I have met someone other than the butcher, whom I might ask.

I began by explaining that the road isn’t so much a road, as a little footpath. And I ought to explain too, that the house isn’t so much a house, as a pair of tiny gatehouses; each one quite complete and separate in itself, but joined to the other at the top by an ornamental superstructure, that conceals the common attic and bestrides the road. It seemed just the thing for Bill and me; we could hardly believe our luck. We had been looking for something that was divisible down the middle in some way, but had hardly expected to be separated by anything quite so emphatic as a little road. Here, we would be able to lead our perfectly separate, independent lives – yet to meet, had only to pop out of our respective little doors like the man and woman in the Swiss weather clocks…….

We make odd housemates, Bill and I. Everybody says so, and none with a more genuine astonishment than we ourselves. It just happened that we found ourselves washed up on the shores of approaching old age alone, and more or less simultaneously (I widowed, he divorced) - so that the sensible thing seemed to be to pool resources, and look for a house to share. I can see it’s not going to be easy though. Brother and sister we may be, but we have never been close, and our lives could hardly have been more different. I have spent the last decade caring for our elderly parents, and then for my first grandchild - whilst Bill has been racketing about the world, as he puts it, in his capacity as foreign correspondent for one of the television channels. He’s not used to sitting about, and certainly not in cottages. He has been accustomed to live his life out of suitcases, always ready at a moment’s notice to fly out of what he calls the danger of the domestic front, into the comparative safety of a war zone. He says that’s why his marriage failed, and his children no longer seem to want to speak to him…..

He’s home from hospital now, settled to some extent in his side of the cottage – though finding all sorts of fault with my arrangements. He has his doubts about the cottage’s perfect capacity to contain him, for a start. He’s a big man, inclined to lounge; he says his legs have a way of coming up against solid objects, no matter in which direction he tries to extend them. His head is in constant contact with the ceilings, besides – I hear his bellowed imprecations, and wonder how long it will be before he learns to duck. He’s rather morose just now for Bill, in fact; I’m told it’s a part of the recovery process. He goes out each day for longish walks of course, but only with his dog. His old Monty has seen it all, he says - is a regular old dog-at-arms himself, and the only possible companion. (I ought to explain at this point that Bill’s imagery always tends to have something of the battlefield about it. It’s only to be expected, I suppose, from one of his experience. Though it can be just a little un-nerving; and I do wonder how well it will go down in so obviously peaceable a district? Or indeed in blogland?).

All these things will settle down in time, I expect. Bill will find some way of extending his legs, and defending his head – and some person just congenial enough, it’s to be hoped, with whom to drink his daily pint in one of the local pubs. And I - well, sooner or later I must begin to meet people, and make friends. Everything will turn out to have been all for the best in the end, I’m sure. It will have to, since what with stamp duty and everything else, there’s not the smallest possibility of our moving yet again…