joy.
Entering the village where Limestone Cottage was located, they lurched up a steep and rocky drive that rose at an awkward angle straight from the road. The cheerful little cottage was set, just as the picture showed, in a frame of mature beech trees.
"Oh, God. Is this Limestone Cottage?" Rosie's heart was plummeting faster than those blocks of frozen effluent from plane lavatories that so often seemed to crash through Croydon conservatories and end up in Mark's paper.
What the photograph had failed to even hint at was the expanse of raw, white hillside, ugly boxlike buildings, and piles of sacks on pallets stretching around the cottage on all sides. "It's in the middle of a quarry," snapped Mark.
Rosie felt terribly sorry for the pretty little building, its lawn choked with dust, its mellow stone powdered with limestone aggregate, and its roof slumped in defeat. And yet, even so, it seemed the only graceful spot amid so much ugliness.
"Bloody estate agents," Mark snarled, twisting the key with its brown label agitatedly between his fingers. "Now I see why it's so bloody cheap."
Overwhelmingly in the cottage's favor, on the other hand, was the fact that they could afford it; a rare thing, given what Nigel kept tactfully referring to as their "restrictive financial situation." A situation that certainly restricted all possibilities of sublime properties such as the one currently commandeering virtually the whole of the agency's front window. Rosie, arriving with Mark to meet Nigel that morning, had spotted it straightaway. A beautiful Jacobean manor house set in an old-fashioned garden, the only nonexquisite thing about it had been its name. The Bottoms.
"A perfect country house in miniature," the description had run. An exceptional Grade I listed country house of great historical interest set in superbly maintained gardens and grounds with far-reaching views. An example of secular Jacobean building at its finest. The Bottoms boasts a number of historical features including a priest hole, molded plaster work ceilings, heraldic fireplaces, and stone-flagged floors throughout. Five large bedrooms, three south-facing reception rooms, attics, vaulted cellars with capacity for conversion into a gymnasium…
"Horrid idea. I'd never do that," Rosie had said, looking at the sunlit stone front with its carved lions and standing sentinel, age-blackened chimneys, and finialed gables and trying to imagine someone underneath it all sweating away on a running machine.
"I wouldn't worry," Mark had drawled. "We can barely afford the running machine, let alone the house."
***
As the day went on, the yawning chasm between the estate agents' descriptions and the bricks-and-mortar reality became increasingly evident. Agents' details, they realized, contained a whole code of euphemisms to crack—"lots of potential" almost invariably seemed to translate as "lots of work," while "garden in transitional state" usually turned out to refer to an area entirely paved over in concrete through whose unsightly cracks grass and weeds were steadily gaining ground. As for "mature" gardens, most of the ones Mark and Rosie saw were not only old but positively dribbling with infirmity. One or two definitely had Alzheimer's. So much for the Property Misdescriptions Act. Similarly, details such as "door, Suffolk latch, painted white" were usually a ruse to distract attention from the shortcomings in the bigger picture, such as it not being wired for electricity.
Although, much to Rosie's relief, there were no butcher's shops on Mark's list (she had, however, overheard him asking Nigel about them), they did view a converted tripe shop next to a pub that, plastered with signs for Saturday-night karaoke, forthcoming real ale festivals, and caravan rallies, not to mention the dread sign COACH PARTIES WELCOME, had even Mark clearing his throat and muttering about it not being
Entering the village where Limestone Cottage was located, they lurched up a steep and rocky drive that rose at an awkward angle straight from the road. The cheerful little cottage was set, just as the picture showed, in a frame of mature beech trees.
"Oh, God. Is this Limestone Cottage?" Rosie's heart was plummeting faster than those blocks of frozen effluent from plane lavatories that so often seemed to crash through Croydon conservatories and end up in Mark's paper.
What the photograph had failed to even hint at was the expanse of raw, white hillside, ugly boxlike buildings, and piles of sacks on pallets stretching around the cottage on all sides. "It's in the middle of a quarry," snapped Mark.
Rosie felt terribly sorry for the pretty little building, its lawn choked with dust, its mellow stone powdered with limestone aggregate, and its roof slumped in defeat. And yet, even so, it seemed the only graceful spot amid so much ugliness.
"Bloody estate agents," Mark snarled, twisting the key with its brown label agitatedly between his fingers. "Now I see why it's so bloody cheap."
Overwhelmingly in the cottage's favor, on the other hand, was the fact that they could afford it; a rare thing, given what Nigel kept tactfully referring to as their "restrictive financial situation." A situation that certainly restricted all possibilities of sublime properties such as the one currently commandeering virtually the whole of the agency's front window. Rosie, arriving with Mark to meet Nigel that morning, had spotted it straightaway. A beautiful Jacobean manor house set in an old-fashioned garden, the only nonexquisite thing about it had been its name. The Bottoms.
"A perfect country house in miniature," the description had run. An exceptional Grade I listed country house of great historical interest set in superbly maintained gardens and grounds with far-reaching views. An example of secular Jacobean building at its finest. The Bottoms boasts a number of historical features including a priest hole, molded plaster work ceilings, heraldic fireplaces, and stone-flagged floors throughout. Five large bedrooms, three south-facing reception rooms, attics, vaulted cellars with capacity for conversion into a gymnasium…
"Horrid idea. I'd never do that," Rosie had said, looking at the sunlit stone front with its carved lions and standing sentinel, age-blackened chimneys, and finialed gables and trying to imagine someone underneath it all sweating away on a running machine.
"I wouldn't worry," Mark had drawled. "We can barely afford the running machine, let alone the house."
***
As the day went on, the yawning chasm between the estate agents' descriptions and the bricks-and-mortar reality became increasingly evident. Agents' details, they realized, contained a whole code of euphemisms to crack—"lots of potential" almost invariably seemed to translate as "lots of work," while "garden in transitional state" usually turned out to refer to an area entirely paved over in concrete through whose unsightly cracks grass and weeds were steadily gaining ground. As for "mature" gardens, most of the ones Mark and Rosie saw were not only old but positively dribbling with infirmity. One or two definitely had Alzheimer's. So much for the Property Misdescriptions Act. Similarly, details such as "door, Suffolk latch, painted white" were usually a ruse to distract attention from the shortcomings in the bigger picture, such as it not being wired for electricity.
Although, much to Rosie's relief, there were no butcher's shops on Mark's list (she had, however, overheard him asking Nigel about them), they did view a converted tripe shop next to a pub that, plastered with signs for Saturday-night karaoke, forthcoming real ale festivals, and caravan rallies, not to mention the dread sign COACH PARTIES WELCOME, had even Mark clearing his throat and muttering about it not being
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