to tidying the kitchen. As well as the house, she had inherited its two cats, Rousillou (said to be Occitan for ‘small red thing’) and his mother, Blanquette. Blanquette was a smoke-tinted Abyssinian of whom so few traces were imprinted on her son that she was assumed to have married down. Both cats were extremely loquacious, mewing as often from a wish to be sociable as from hunger or irritation. Emma tried not to talk to them too much. It was an easy habit into which to slip, however, so her self-discipline in this quarter tended to stretch only as far as not talking to her cats in front of other people.
Since her telephone conversation with Fergus Gibson yesterday, her house had received a major spring cleaning. Emma’s original intention had been merely to run around with a Hoover, to do a little dusting and conceivably, to clean the wash basins. In the event, she had started to enjoy herself so much that she had been quite carried away and had hauled rugs out to the washing line for beating, had turned mattresses, washed windows and even lifted pot plants off the window sills so as to wipe away the brown rings left underneath. She had retrieved stale copies of Sunday papers (she saved money on weekdays by reading papers in the staff common room), The Times Literary Supplement, History Today , and The Church Times from points of accumulation around the house and had tied them up in neat bundles in the woodshed. Her father had taken out a life subscription to The Church Times and the paper continued to arrive regardless of his decease. Emma had intended to write them a cancellation letter long ago, but had become a quiet fan of the quirky journal and continued to read it, cherishing the hope that the subscription department would now never notice their oversight.
She had taken everything out of the larder, washed the shelves and even wiped the dust off storage jars and the stickiness off jam pots before she set them neatly back. She had sorted through the bathroom cupboard and thrown out old pills and several tubes of her late father’s pile ointment which she had been keeping on the rather depressing offchance that they might come in useful some day. In a final blast of enthusiasm last night, she had taken all her late father’s suits, shirts, shoes and ties and piled them into bin liners, along with some clothes she had not donned since the Indian cotton summer of 1977. She had telephoned the Spastics Shop before setting out for this morning’s school, and a whinnying sort of woman had just come round to take it all away in her Morris Oxford. The house now had a clean, expectant feel to it.
Emma sat with her post-lunch coffee in the sitting room and waited. Blanquette emerged from under the sofa, jumped with a mew to her lap, sniffed the coffee and, rejecting it, lay down. Mr Gibson had said ‘after lunch’ but that could be now, which was 1.30, or in two hours’ time. She hoped he would not expect her to harbour any strong tastes of her own. She judged houses on the air they conveyed and was not wont to think in terms of wallpaper or painting effects. On her way home to her rendezvous with the whinnying Spastics envoy, she had bought a copy of House and Garden and found it deeply disturbing. Certainly she possessed the initiative to march into town, pore over colour cards and do the place up herself over a score of weekends and long afternoons, but the transformation – exorcism almost – which she had in mind was so momentous that she had a horror of making a mistake. Renovating a late father’s house was not so different from building a chapel in which to house his corpse; a task best left to other, impersonal hands.
The garden gate clanged. Emma jumped up and stood peering from the gloom at the back of the room. She barely glimpsed six feet worth of brown tweed striding past the window towards the porch. The knocker was struck. Her coffee was too hot to drink. She hurried into the downstairs lavatory
Since her telephone conversation with Fergus Gibson yesterday, her house had received a major spring cleaning. Emma’s original intention had been merely to run around with a Hoover, to do a little dusting and conceivably, to clean the wash basins. In the event, she had started to enjoy herself so much that she had been quite carried away and had hauled rugs out to the washing line for beating, had turned mattresses, washed windows and even lifted pot plants off the window sills so as to wipe away the brown rings left underneath. She had retrieved stale copies of Sunday papers (she saved money on weekdays by reading papers in the staff common room), The Times Literary Supplement, History Today , and The Church Times from points of accumulation around the house and had tied them up in neat bundles in the woodshed. Her father had taken out a life subscription to The Church Times and the paper continued to arrive regardless of his decease. Emma had intended to write them a cancellation letter long ago, but had become a quiet fan of the quirky journal and continued to read it, cherishing the hope that the subscription department would now never notice their oversight.
She had taken everything out of the larder, washed the shelves and even wiped the dust off storage jars and the stickiness off jam pots before she set them neatly back. She had sorted through the bathroom cupboard and thrown out old pills and several tubes of her late father’s pile ointment which she had been keeping on the rather depressing offchance that they might come in useful some day. In a final blast of enthusiasm last night, she had taken all her late father’s suits, shirts, shoes and ties and piled them into bin liners, along with some clothes she had not donned since the Indian cotton summer of 1977. She had telephoned the Spastics Shop before setting out for this morning’s school, and a whinnying sort of woman had just come round to take it all away in her Morris Oxford. The house now had a clean, expectant feel to it.
Emma sat with her post-lunch coffee in the sitting room and waited. Blanquette emerged from under the sofa, jumped with a mew to her lap, sniffed the coffee and, rejecting it, lay down. Mr Gibson had said ‘after lunch’ but that could be now, which was 1.30, or in two hours’ time. She hoped he would not expect her to harbour any strong tastes of her own. She judged houses on the air they conveyed and was not wont to think in terms of wallpaper or painting effects. On her way home to her rendezvous with the whinnying Spastics envoy, she had bought a copy of House and Garden and found it deeply disturbing. Certainly she possessed the initiative to march into town, pore over colour cards and do the place up herself over a score of weekends and long afternoons, but the transformation – exorcism almost – which she had in mind was so momentous that she had a horror of making a mistake. Renovating a late father’s house was not so different from building a chapel in which to house his corpse; a task best left to other, impersonal hands.
The garden gate clanged. Emma jumped up and stood peering from the gloom at the back of the room. She barely glimpsed six feet worth of brown tweed striding past the window towards the porch. The knocker was struck. Her coffee was too hot to drink. She hurried into the downstairs lavatory
Similar Books
