don’t think the bomb even went off. But the terrorist is still very much at large. And in our street!
Should I call some of our old neighbours to commiserate, or would it seem like gloating? Don’t know. Would dearly love to discover whose garden he’s hiding in, though. Because if he leapt over the wall from the tube station, as they’re saying he did, he must be on our side of the road, which means he might even be in our garden. Ex-garden, that is.
In any case, it’s all very…exciting’s the wrong word, of course. Shocking. Shocking. Poor old London. I suddenly feel a bit like a rat deserting a sinking ship. Awful. On the other hand it is slightly annoying, after ten years putting up with all those boring, unsolved low-level mini-crimes, to be missing out on the big one. Our old house might even be on the news.
Ripley and Dora found a drowned hedgehog in the swimming pool earlier this morning. Their obsession with all aspects of the ongoing—and apparently endless—embalming-and-burial ceremony is teetering on fetishistic, I think. Dora claims she’s been studying the Egyptians at school but it’s the first time she’s mentioned it, and I don’t know what R’s excuse is. Last I saw, he had covered the wretched animal in yoghurt and very small lumps of Playdough; and Dora, in mystical monotone, was invoking ‘voodoo and death spirits’ over the body. Is that what people did to the Pharaohs? I think not. In any case I’m finding it faintly disturbing. Also wasteful of yoghurt and needlessly untidy. Perhaps this news from home might distract them a bit.
Still in France. Lovely. Bad economics, perhaps. But we had to go somewhere. The Dream House is due to become officially ours exactly two days after we get back. We exchange and complete simultaneously. Which means—as Fin so wittily insists on pointing out—we could still duck out if we wanted to. We could still change our minds.
Except we don’t want to. Everything’s going to be wonderful.
Also, Hatty called this morning. Took a break from her very important job looking after other people’s billions to tell me she had read somewhere, possibly in Heat, that Johnny Depp had just bought a small stately home in the same area as our Dream House. The article didn’t say exactly where it was, but apparently JD and the wife, who I know is famous but can’t remember her name, have been touring all the schools in what is about to be our local town. Which means they’ll have done a tour of Ripley and Dora’s school. Which means—perhaps—that Ripley and Dora and the little Deppies could wind up being in the same classes together, which means they could wind up being friends! Which means we could be friends!
I picture us now: JD—and the wife—and all the other new friends we’re going to make…I can see us relaxing on our beautiful terrace. The children are upstairs, snoozing. (Perhaps the little Deppies are upstairs with them, having a sleepover.) And we’re drinking wine, we’re talking films and novels, we’re basking in the warmth of our outdoor heaters, watching the stars in the big, open sky and then maybe…God, I dunno. Perhaps Johnny produces a couple of grams of—
Dora, Ripley and I are going to bake cakes together, and pick apples together, and speak to each other in French. We’re going to build bonfires and learn the names of wild flowers, and plant a Christmas tree so we can use the same one every year. We’re going to learn to ride, and I might get some geese and a little Jersey cow, and every day after school we’re going to climb up into the fields and the woods behind the house, and—yes—go kite flying. And we’ll have picnics together, and read old-fashioned novels out loud to one another: Swallows and Amazons, for example. Black Beauty. Treasure Island. Little Women. Maybe, when they’re older, even a bit of Dickens…
I’ve not been a perfect mother up until now. I’ve been chaotic and impatient and always in a hurry and usually hung-over and constantly preoccupied, if not by my work then by chatting to my friends on the blower. I hate cooking. I hate making angel get-ups out of cardboard. I never remember whose friend is coming to tea on what day, or when the term starts. I love it when the children watch DVDs. And I always forget to go to parents’ evenings. Mea culpa. That’s enough of that. They know I love them, I suppose.
In any case all that’s going to change from now on. It is.
For example, I’ve ordered the sew-on nametags. There’s something special about sew-on nametags, of course. They’re a sort of ‘From a good home’ branding mark; possibly a ‘My mother doesn’t work’ branding mark, too (but I mustn’t be bitter). Either way, they shout of stable upbringings, balanced diets, selfless parenting and time management at its best. So I’ve ordered the nametags and if it kills me, I am going to sew them on. It will be the first step in what I fully intend to be a long and glorious transition from hassled, incompetent and very slightly selfish urban working mother to laid-back earth-mother-style Domestic Goddess. That’s right.
I will still work, of course. But I’ll do it when the children are asleep or at school. Or something. And after school the children will be free to play in the fields, and I won’t sit on the sidelines muttering to myself over the newspapers. In fact I may even give up reading newspapers altogether. And the time that I save not reading them I shall now spend playing with the children because from now on—and this is a promise—
I am going to be a completely different human being.
On the ferry home at last. Lots of fat, bored, hideous teenagers wandering around eating crisps and shouting. Is it possible that Ripley and Dora might one day turn into flabby, oral-fixated morons just like these? And if so, do I really want to be stranded with them, day after day, deep in the English countryside, while my husband travels up and down to Soho? Possibly not.
Ripley and Dora have gone to explore, by which they mean find the sweet shop. Fin’s reading a film script. He has another one resting beneath it, ready for him to read after that. And it occurs to me I’m feeling more than a little bit irritable. Not surprisingly, perhaps. We’re due to exchange and complete on the new house the day after tomorrow, and we’ve neither of us set eyes on it since May.
Thousands of people do what we’re doing. Families move out of London every day, and they all claim to be very happy about it. They can’t all be lying. Can they? It’s going to be wonderful. It’s going to be better than wonderful.
I wonder if Johnny Depp plays tennis?
Filthy weather. Bloody England.
The estate agent made it clear he didn’t want us to visit the house this morning. He tried hard to sound too busy to fit us in, but it was obvious he had nothing else to do. I got the distinct impression he was suppressing a yawn for the entire conversation.
So we left the children with Finley’s parents and drove over. Looking at the map, we thought it would take only about forty-five minutes but—fresh to this bucolic existence as we are—we hadn’t fully taken into our calculations the tractor factor.
In any case the journey took over two hours, just as Finley’s father had always
