They have all gone.
Mark has buzzed off back to Aberdeen to negotiate his way into a higher salary, more holidays and a better pension from whoever it is he thinks is a soft touch at the moment: and I have taken the children back to school.
It is terribly quiet.
I can hear the dog fidgeting on the sofa downstairs. He thinks I don’t know that he is there.
I can hear the clock ticking.
I can hear the guinea pig eating lettuce in his cage.
It was all a bit sad, really, because I have been desperately busy working this holidays, and haven’t had the time or the cash to do anything much with them. Lucy said it didn’t matter because I am fairly tedious company anyway, and Oliver said stoically that he didn’t mind: but I felt guilty, in the special sort of way that you do when you are a parent, and made helpless and wishful promises that ‘next holidays it will be better’: which we all knew it wouldn’t.
Oliver’s school smells of boys and furniture polish, and is warm and friendly and a bit shabby in the nice home-like way which says people aren’t precious about things, and also that three hundred boys live there. The headmaster shook his hand in a welcoming manner as we came in and asked politely what he had been doing with his holidays, which I suppose I should have expected. Oliver looked blank, and a bit guilty, and the headmaster suggested kindly that maybe he had been watching television. Oliver agreed instantly and untruthfully, because we have’t actually got a television, but I think he was pleased at not having to admit that he has spent virtually the whole of half-term playing some horrible PlayStation game called something like ‘revenge nightmare of the savage bloodthirsty killer undead zombie massacre’, with his friend Harry from up the road, interspersed by occasional real-life zombie enactments with Nerf guns and crashes. (I think it likely that it may not have been very suitable for nine year olds.) Harry has stayed with us for several nights, and there have been whoops and yells and explosions and zombie groans coming from Oliver’s bedroom all week, which may be why it seems very quiet now.
Fortunately the headmaster didn’t make any further enquiries and was spared graphic details of Oliver’s holiday activities, and then it was time to go. We hugged each other as hard as we could, to make it last three weeks, and then he was gone, a little waving figure left behind in the school yard in the dusk.
Lucy’s school is about an hour further on from Oliver’s and it was dark by the time we got there. She kindly allowed me to help her lug her sacks of tuck back up to her dorm. Oliver is not allowed tuck at his school, it is very sensibly issued by the staff as inducement to good behaviour: but Lucy’s school presumably felt they preferred not to have the management of four hundred adolescent girls without free access to chocolate, and so Lucy’s luggage always includes about a hundredweight of Cadburys as well as an extensive selection of haircare products and spot-banishing unguents. She needed me to leave the premises quickly, in case anybody made the embarrassing observation that she possessed a parent, and ushered me out hastily, with quick hugs and promises that she would call in the unlikely event that she wanted something, and then I was on my own.
School is wonderful. They love their schools and I love them being there. It is lots better than being ignored and callously abandoned to play ghastly games and get their own lunch whilst I go and wring money out of unsuspecting holidaymakers on the taxi rank. They are learning so much, and in the end they will have opportunities that I couldn’t ever have imagined. They are happy and lively and excited and fulfilled at school, and I never for even a minute stop feeling pleased and grateful that they have both got this incredible start in their lives. It makes everything I do worth all the effort.
…but it’s ever so quiet tonight…
