from London. But it has the same magical, forgotten feeling as the house from the dream that I had, and when I saw it—when I turned the final corner of that winding path and looked up, and saw it properly for the first time—I swear it was so lovely it took my breath away.
The house is in the middle of a small village and just three miles up the road from a beautiful, old-fashioned market town. It perches alone, big and solid and perfectly symmetrical, on a hill so steep and so high above the village road that when you look up towards it all the proportions seem distorted. Actually it reminds me of an Addams Family cartoon: quite grand, in a way, though clearly dilapidated; with a stone porch, and in front of the porch a stone terrace, and in front of that a stone carved balustrade, drowning in jasmine and honeysuckle and ivy.
It has more bedrooms than we need, and more sitting rooms, and more cellars and underground vaults and cupboards and attics and cubbyholes than we’ll ever know what to do with. But the children can build camps in them. That’s the whole point. Or they can attach a rope ladder to the wall at the top of the back garden, and escape into the fields on the other side.
Not only that; it’s only a few miles—almost bicycling distance—from the train station, which means, on a more practical note, that Fin can travel up and down to his office in Soho almost as easily as if he were taking the tube from Shepherds Bush. In fact everything about the house is so perfect, so romantic and so good for the trains, it seems quite peculiar that we can even afford it. Houses in this corner of the world are far from cheap. What with one thing and another—the beautiful, protected countryside, the trains that carry people so easily back and forth to Soho and the City—this is probably one of the most expensive corners of rustic paradise in England.
Maybe the fact that you can’t get a car to the door might put a few people off. We both positively like that. It makes the place feel more secluded. In any case, with or without the access, this house could hardly be described as a cheapie and we are fully prepared to encumber ourselves with a monumental mortgage.
God knows, of all the options we’ve considered, the South West of England is hardly the most adventurous…but. But. But. But. It works. The schools are good. The house—I think I dreamed of. And in any case, whatever happens, however it turns out, we’ve been festering in London for far too long. It’s about time we had an adventure.
We put our London house up for sale within the week, and made an offer for the Dream House that afternoon. It was rejected out of hand. So we upped the bid. They didn’t even bother to respond. Two days later we saw the house advertised in the Sunday Times. So we sulked for a few days and then upped the bid again. And again.
The horrible ‘vendors’—him with his self-important beard; her with her sour mouth and her chignon—have finally accepted our offer. Bastards. Their obstinate refusal to sell us the house for anything less than it’s actually worth has led me to develop a searing hatred for them both, and especially for the woman—whose chignon, by the way, isn’t elegant, as she thinks it is, but actually quite embarrassing. Never mind, though. In my new country persona I’ve definitely decided I’m going to try to stop being such a bitch. I’m going to focus on people’s positive sides. So.
On a more positive note, we’ve pretty much sold in Shepherds Bush. It was all very quick and easy. Slightly too quick, in fact. Unlike Beardie and the Chignon, we didn’t insist on getting the highest price. So now we’re about to exchange contracts, and we have to be out of this house by the first week of July…which leaves us homeless for about two months. Too long, really, to invite ourselves to stay with parents or friends. So we’ll have to rent somewhere. Maybe we’ll rent abroad, since the children are on holiday. Why not? I have the next novel due in before too long and I can write it wherever I like. In fact that’s one of the reasons we can move out of London. And Fin will be away filming anyway.
In any case, if all goes according to plan the Dream House will be ours some time at the end of August.
2 a.m., July 10th Shepherds Bush
Will I wind up wearing a chignon and having a mouth like an old cat’s arse? Or will it be worse than that? Will I turn fat and mousey, and never get out of my anorak? Or will I hit the bottle and never get out of bed? Will my friends keep in touch with me? Will I keep in touch with them? Will Fin get a lover in London and never come home? Will I—
I’ve been lying here worrying for hours, thinking maybe we’re making a terrible mistake, thinking maybe we’d be better off staying in London after all—and then I heard it, the old muffled smash, the panicky boot-shuffle, the ruffle-ruffle-slam: a series of sounds so familiar to Shepherds Bush night life I could probably recognise them from my sleep, integrate them seamlessly into any one of my dreams.
It is the musical sound of yet another car windscreen biting the dust. Not ours, though, on this occasion. It can’t be, unfortunately, because we still haven’t fixed ours from the week before last.
Maybe I should call the police?
Shall I call the police? Can I be bothered? It means getting out of bed, and then they probably won’t even pick up the telephone…Or if they do, they’ll get here too late to do anything about it. And I’ll have to give them my name and address and possibly even a cup of tea, and it’ll wake up the entire house and the children will never go back to sleep and the whole thing will be a waste of time. I can’t be bothered.
Maybe I should just knock on the window and give the little sods a jolt by shaking my fist at them? Or maybe I shouldn’t. Not much to be gained from being a have-a-go hero in this dark corner of the woods. A couple of boys kicked through the front door of Number 35 last week, with the owners inside and screaming. I certainly wouldn’t want to encourage that.
What shall I do then? Switch on the telly and pretend I can’t hear them? Except the remote’s broken. No, I think I’ll just lie here until it goes quiet out there and then, er, put down the diary and go to sleep. Next time they come, maybe I’ll call the police.
Except I won’t, of course, because there won’t be a next time. We’ll be gone. We’ll have left it all behind: street crime, parking fines, Ken Livingstone, London…We’ve had enough of it all.
I think we have.
At any rate I hope we have, because most of our belongings are already in storage half way up the M5. Finley, the two children and I—and the new puppy (called Mabel, after the dream)—we’re moving on. To a new and fragrant life in the slow lane. We will be joining that peculiar section of the human race that doesn’t get baity when queuing. Somehow. And there’s clearly not a single reason to be feeling nervous about it.
In any case the children and I—and Finley and his mobile, intermittently—have a good long break in France ahead of us, to mull the thing over.
It’s a rough old life.
Things have gone a bit crazy
