Read Online Our Picnics in the Sun by Morag Joss - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Morag Joss
Tags: Mystery
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claim the whole house for ourselves.
In the hall, I’d cleared away the tourist leaflets and Visitors’ Book from the sideboard and put a copper jug of dried grasses on it instead, but the place still had a look of institutional gloom, like a run-down sanatorium. Howard’s folded wheelchair stood between the fire extinguisher in its bracket on the wall and the table with the bookings diary and telephone on it.
I couldn’t do anything about the carpet. It had been here when we moved in and wasn’t very old at the time, so we’d kept it until we could afford something we liked. It was of that dark red, drenched-looking kind you see in pubs and it had a pattern of small swirls that reminded me of mince. Now it was worn through in several places and shedding long fronds of black underlay that were always getting caught in the wheelchair, so I’d covered the worst patches with doormats and rugs, which crossed the floor like oblong stepping stones. On both sides of the hall, above the yellowish oak wainscoting, the walls were still hung with the mismatched antlers that also had come with the house. I’d never exactly liked them, but of course I’d gone along with Howard, who said they “belonged” here. Or, put another way, I liked the idea of us as respecters of our predecessors’ history, which for some reason sat quite comfortably with my zeal to supplant it with our own. In those early days we were too romantic to point out to each other that the history of Stoneyridge’s former owners was unromantically recent, or that the farmhouse wasn’t old orat all pretty, having been built in 1924 of red brick and pebbledash to the same design as hundreds of suburban villas going up at the time in Minehead and Exeter. Digger had showed us round. Although unoccupied for the five years since his grandmother had died, the house was, he said, a “rare opportunity,” available on a long lease and protected rent to tenants who’d make good the fabric of the building, and it came with two paddocks and twenty acres of grazing on the surrounding moor. I was too young to bother that Howard’s money wasn’t enough to buy us a place, or that Digger was getting his redundant farmhouse fixed up at our expense. Neither of us paid much attention when he told us that the protected agricultural tenancy was only valid while we worked the land. If we gave up our smallholding, the tenancy would be void and he’d be entitled to sell or rent out the place as a holiday home. So what, we thought; what else were we here for but to make a success of everything? I remember the surge of protectiveness I felt, seeing the look on Digger’s face as Howard, reassuring him on this point, actually used the phrase
going back to the land
.
But for that lapse, Digger put on the charm. I let him entrance me with the story he spun, about the house being built for his grandmother Elsie who’d come to Stoneyridge as the twenty-year-old bride of the second Diggory Bickford (Digger himself was the fourth, he told us), a man of property nine years older than she was. He was a great catch, he said, for a butcher’s daughter from Minehead, especially one who served behind the counter. It was Elsie and Diggory’s three sons—and the notion of three sons also played nicely into my yearnings for the folkloric life we would lead here—the eldest of them Digger’s father, who started the collection of cast deer antlers they found on the moor.
So the antlers stayed, and some years later when we were painting the hall (a pale shade of orange that time, to stimulate optimism and sociability) and I said I really didn’t want them anymore, Howard was ready with another reason to keep them. They were naturally shed antlers, he said, as opposed to whole mounted stags’ heads, so symbolically they represented the superiority of Nature over the “outdated macho trophyism” of deer hunting. But we eat venison, Isaid, when there’s been a cull and it’s cheap.
In the hall, I’d cleared away the tourist leaflets and Visitors’ Book from the sideboard and put a copper jug of dried grasses on it instead, but the place still had a look of institutional gloom, like a run-down sanatorium. Howard’s folded wheelchair stood between the fire extinguisher in its bracket on the wall and the table with the bookings diary and telephone on it.
I couldn’t do anything about the carpet. It had been here when we moved in and wasn’t very old at the time, so we’d kept it until we could afford something we liked. It was of that dark red, drenched-looking kind you see in pubs and it had a pattern of small swirls that reminded me of mince. Now it was worn through in several places and shedding long fronds of black underlay that were always getting caught in the wheelchair, so I’d covered the worst patches with doormats and rugs, which crossed the floor like oblong stepping stones. On both sides of the hall, above the yellowish oak wainscoting, the walls were still hung with the mismatched antlers that also had come with the house. I’d never exactly liked them, but of course I’d gone along with Howard, who said they “belonged” here. Or, put another way, I liked the idea of us as respecters of our predecessors’ history, which for some reason sat quite comfortably with my zeal to supplant it with our own. In those early days we were too romantic to point out to each other that the history of Stoneyridge’s former owners was unromantically recent, or that the farmhouse wasn’t old orat all pretty, having been built in 1924 of red brick and pebbledash to the same design as hundreds of suburban villas going up at the time in Minehead and Exeter. Digger had showed us round. Although unoccupied for the five years since his grandmother had died, the house was, he said, a “rare opportunity,” available on a long lease and protected rent to tenants who’d make good the fabric of the building, and it came with two paddocks and twenty acres of grazing on the surrounding moor. I was too young to bother that Howard’s money wasn’t enough to buy us a place, or that Digger was getting his redundant farmhouse fixed up at our expense. Neither of us paid much attention when he told us that the protected agricultural tenancy was only valid while we worked the land. If we gave up our smallholding, the tenancy would be void and he’d be entitled to sell or rent out the place as a holiday home. So what, we thought; what else were we here for but to make a success of everything? I remember the surge of protectiveness I felt, seeing the look on Digger’s face as Howard, reassuring him on this point, actually used the phrase
going back to the land
.
But for that lapse, Digger put on the charm. I let him entrance me with the story he spun, about the house being built for his grandmother Elsie who’d come to Stoneyridge as the twenty-year-old bride of the second Diggory Bickford (Digger himself was the fourth, he told us), a man of property nine years older than she was. He was a great catch, he said, for a butcher’s daughter from Minehead, especially one who served behind the counter. It was Elsie and Diggory’s three sons—and the notion of three sons also played nicely into my yearnings for the folkloric life we would lead here—the eldest of them Digger’s father, who started the collection of cast deer antlers they found on the moor.
So the antlers stayed, and some years later when we were painting the hall (a pale shade of orange that time, to stimulate optimism and sociability) and I said I really didn’t want them anymore, Howard was ready with another reason to keep them. They were naturally shed antlers, he said, as opposed to whole mounted stags’ heads, so symbolically they represented the superiority of Nature over the “outdated macho trophyism” of deer hunting. But we eat venison, Isaid, when there’s been a cull and it’s cheap.
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