Chapter 18 #2
But no, Mum wouldn’t. She told Dad: “I refused to accept that she might leave without telling me. Our house wasn’t her anything, and I wanted to know what crazy story she’d made up about it.
If it’s my house, then it’s my business.
I asked her once more, and out it all came in a big splurge: She and her family were about to become what she called ‘dirt poor.’ It was all her husband’s fault—bad investments, too much letting debts get out of control—and so they were having to sell their seventeen-acre smallholding in Oxfordshire and buy somewhere for maximum six hundred grand.
After a period of feeling suicidal, she identified Swaffham Tilney and a few others—Reach, Swaffham Bulbeck, Burwell—as villages that were pretty, quiet, and safe, though no civilized person would live in any of them by choice, of course—”
“She said that?” asked Dad.
Mum nodded. “Swaffham Tilney was her favorite, she realized after a few trips to Cambridgeshire. She rang round estate agents, heard about Shukes from Peter, and ordered him to send photos before he’d even finished putting the brochure together, even though Shukes was right up there at her six-hundred-grand limit, and to be honest with me, she said, she’d hoped to find something palatable for less than five hundred, but every single other home on the market in her price range was a disgusting hovel—”
“She really said that?”
“So it felt like Shukes or nothing,” Mum went on. “When she stood on the village green weeping in August, that was a bad day for her.”
“Yeah, we guessed as much,” said Dad.
“She’d come with high hopes to look at Shukes for the first time.
Peter had told her viewings were still some way off, we were still at the preparations stage, but she couldn’t resist coming to have a nosy from the outside.
She hoped she’d see Shukes and know instantly he was the one for her: the home in which she could be blissfully happy, even though dirt poor. ”
“No one who can afford a six-hundred-grand house is poor at all, in any way, shape, or form,” said Dad. “This woman needs a checkup from the neck up. I hope you told her.”
“To be fair, she realized she might have offended me and apologized: ‘I’m sorry, Sally. I know you probably don’t think of this house as any sort of…massive comedown. I actually envy you. I wish I could see it the way you do. I’d be so much happier.’”
Dad was shaking his head.
“When she came in August for her outdoor surveillance mission, what set her off crying was that Shukes looked so much smaller than in the photos Peter had emailed her.”
“It’s not small!” Dad protested. “We have five bedrooms and three reception rooms, excluding the kitchen! We have a bedroom specially for when I’m drunk and snoring and you don’t want to sleep with me, and we also have the spare room you call Furbert’s room.
How many people have so much space they can reserve entire bedrooms for urns containing dead pets? ”
“There’s no need to yell our floor plan at me.” He was so indignant, Mum couldn’t help smiling. “Also, Furbert’s room isn’t a spare room. It’s his room. And Shukes is a he, not an it.”
“Yeah, if you say so.” Dad sighed.
“It’s true, Mark,” Mum said patiently. “Furbert’s soul is still with us. It’s not about the urn; it’s about him. It means a lot to him to have his own dedicated room, even though he’s…you know…”
“If our house was so shockingly small, why did the Gavey woman make a viewing appointment?” Dad asked.
“She didn’t think she would at first, not once she’d seen it from the outside.
But then she looked again at the alternatives and reminded herself of their depressing hoveliness, and her husband, whom she seems to detest, kept telling her she needed to compromise instead of thinking she could be lady of the manor forever…
and then, she said, she noticed how stunning some of the tiny little details were in the photos of each of Shukes’s rooms, and at that point she fell in love. Until…”
“No back garden,” said Dad.
“Correct. That was when she decided I’d let her down, because Shukes was supposed to be flawless apart from his too-smallness: her perfect house to be poor but happy in.
She’d done her bit—compromised, forgiven him his inadequate square footage—but he hadn’t even met her halfway.
He’d rubbed salt into her wounds, and so had I, and so had Peter, by arranging for there to be no proper back garden, just to spite Lesley Gavey. ”
“Right, well, if she comes back with an offer of double the asking price, we’re not selling to her.” Dad looked fierce.
“Agreed. Don’t worry; she won’t be back.
From her point of view, Shukes fucked around and now he’s going to have to find out—to use a Ree-ism.
She really was awful, Mark. Having got all that off her chest, she ordered a second mug of tea as if I were a branch of Costa, then proceeded to interrogate me: Was I truly happy in this cramped, confined space that I called home?
Was that why I’d made every inch of it so immaculate and beautiful—to compensate?
Have I ever been more materially fortunate than I am now, and if so, do I miss it?
Did we somehow lose our fortune, or were we born poor and deprived? ”
“You’ve got to be exaggerating now.” Dad’s eyes widened. “Tell me you’re making it up.”
“Definitely not making it up,” said Mum.
“Maybe exaggerating a tiny bit, but trust me, that was the gist. ‘And you’ve got a dog!’ she said, properly laughing in a kind of admiring-the-bonkersness way, as if pet parenting is an absurdly ambitious thing to attempt, given the huge financial constraints we’re clearly under.
Then she noticed the framed portrait of Furbs and asked if that was Champ and I told her it wasn’t, it was Furbert, our first dog.
And then, I don’t know why, but…I started to tell her all about him.
It was as if her sadness kind of…reached into me and brought out all my grief, and I thought maybe she was as sad to have to leave her home as I was sad about Furbs.
Maybe her house felt like a member of the family, the way Shukes does to me.
But then she soon made me hate myself for telling her anything at all, because when I happened to mention Furby’s full name, she looked affronted and said, ‘Furbert Herbert Lambert—are you serious, Sally?’ I told her I was, and guess what the nasty witch said? ”
“That it’s a daft name?” Dad’s face assumed a mischievous expression. “I seem to remember someone else saying something sim—”
“She frowned and said, ‘It’s not fair to give a dog a joke name like that, Sally. It’s disrespectful, actually.’ That’s when I told her to stick it up her vicious arse and fuck off.”
“You said that? Nice one!”
“My version of that, yes,” said Mum. “I pretended to remember an important Zoom meeting that was starting in five minutes and told her she had to leave.”