Today, in our new house, she has fields directly behind where we live. So that’s good. The lady wanted fields; we got them for her. That is how modern families work. Except yesterday, when I suggested that she might actually go and play in them, Dora replied: “It turns out fields are a bit boring.”
It’s not that I want to kill her or anything, because I don’t. Obviously. But there was another house, which didn’t have fields. And we chose this one instead. It’s the last time I’ll ever give her what she wants. She’s getting a tin of car polish next Christmas.
The other house, without the fields, was £50,000 cheaper than this one, I’m remembering now. It had a nice, flat garden and a kitchen already built. And it wasn’t “uniquely positioned” either, as our imaginative estate agent chose to put it.
The house we live in now is so uniquely positioned I doubt we will ever be able to sell it. Not, heaven forbid, that we should ever want to, of course. It perches on a slope so sheer that we can’t get the car to the front door. To reach the house, we have to park about 50ft below, clamber up 33 steps (each one counted, often) and over a slippery, winding, unlit path, where there may be giant slugs and murderers lurking.
All of which seemed droll and refreshingly rustic when we first spotted the place that distant, sun-dappled day back in July.
Advertisement
At some point, to be fair, I did ask the owners if the lack of any sensible access had proved an inconvenience. They looked at me as if I were mad. They were horrible people, as a matter of fact. A tight little family of cold fish, strangely snooty and addicted to all things taupe. They were adamant — in their snooty way — that the heart-palpitating scramble required to reach the front door had barely registered on their consciousness, and they all told me so with such disdain — Mummy, Daddy and the spooky 18-year-old — that I felt silly having brought up the subject at all.
I have since learnt (from a neighbour) that the problem used to keep them awake at nights — or not so much the problem of the scramble as the problem of the distance between house and car. They wanted to sleep soundly in the knowledge that their vehicle was safe and dry. Country people are odd about car security, I’ve discovered. Especially in the idlyllic west, where there is barely any threat to it anyway. I lost count of the times our car was broken into in Shepherd’s Bush. If it happened here, the story would probably make the front page of the local paper. Seriously. (A boy who had his bike stolen in the park did.) In any case, they had submitted plans, all refused by the council, to build underground garages into the face of the hill, with a linking subterranean tunnel to the front door. One way or another, they were being a little economical with l’actualité on top of all their other crimes — their appalling addiction to beige, their lack of books or senses of humour But so it goes. All’s fair in love and real estate. The kitchen ceiling is on the point of collapse. Ditto the guttering. Ditto the vaulted cellar room, built into the hill of the back garden. There is no water in the upstairs bathroom; the central heating doesn’t work properly; the supporting beams are riven with woodworm.
So we have a lot of work to do. But none of it matters. The snooty owners might have thrown themselves to the ground and sobbed for hatred of their impregnable hill and the fact that their entire, uniquely positioned house was in the process of sliding down it. We wouldn’t have listened.