Mark is home.
He tiptoed in at three o’clock in the morning. I had not waited up, and was briefly startled, but of course it wasn’t a burglar, and everything was fine.
We were woken up again a couple of hours later when poor Roger Poopy, who was excluded from Lucy’s room because of the interloper Jack, began to howl in his grief-stricken sleep.
He woke himself up and there was an embarrassed silence.
He is very sad.
It did not help when everybody laughed this morning. We tried not to laugh, and were sympathetic with a poor heartbroken little dog, but he was devastated all the same.
He has got a perfectly comfortable dog-bed, which he shares with Rosie, who not only adores him, but is even prepared to lick out his ears when he is getting a bit waxy. He can hardly imagine himself unloved, but nevertheless he is forlorn today.
Lucy went home whilst we were out on our walk, and he was disappointed to find them absent on our return. They had dashed off early in order to visit the tile shop with the beautiful emerald and gold tiles.
I thought we might have a day of settling ourselves back to doing things, but Mark was otherwise occupied. He had ordered a new compressor in his absence, which, infuriatingly, had been delivered to the front door about a week ago. I don’t know how John the postman managed it, it was so massively heavy I only just managed to lug it inside.
I got it as far as the landing and left it there, squatting solidly at the top of the stairs waiting to go down to the back yard. I have been hoovering round it ever since, without much affection.
Today he unpacked it and discovered it was damaged. Obviously I have not damaged it. I would not have been able to lift it, never mind throw it down the stairs, which was what it looked as if it had befallen it, but damaged it was. A bit called a pressure gauge had broken off the side and the screw threads would not turn. Mark thought he could probably fix it but felt aggrieved at having had to fork out a hundred quid for something that turned out to be broken, so he didn’t. In the end we shoved it all back in its box and took it back to the Post Office.
This was a bit of an adventure. It was too heavy to be carried so Mark tied some rope around it and stuck a long pole through the rope, and we carried it with an end each, as if it were a hunting trophy and we the blood-besmeared victors.
We dumped it in a corner of the Post Office for Nigel to hoover round it instead. I do not know how the postman is going to manage to shift it. I hope he has a wheelbarrow. If I was the Post Office I would tell people to get lost for anything that was much heavier than a couple of shovels full of bricks.
I had also been hoping quite hard to have a night off work and to slope off to shirk at the Indian restaurant, but in the end we did not have enough cash. I had a very quiet night at work last night, and Mark’s employer has told us it will be thirty days before they get their act together and pay his invoice, so that was the end of that.
I didn’t even get round to going to Booths, and I had to scrape together a rather hasty taxi picnic out of things left over in the fridge. There were not very many appetising leftovers, so actually not only was it not a Night of Celebration but a very rubbish night in which a tomato sandwich was obliged to be the highlight.
To make matters worse, Mark remembered when it was all too late that he had some money in his telephone case after all, and we could have gone if only he had thought of it sooner, but I had made the taxi picnic by then and it would have felt shockingly wasteful to give it to the dogs, who don’t like tomatoes anyway.
I ought to have been very brave and noble and told Mark encouragingly that it didn’t matter, but I didn’t, and I sulked around feeling out of sorts and muttering for a while, just to make sure he remembers next time.
I am rubbish at being brave and noble, perhaps secretly I am no better than Prince Hazzer.
We won’t be going out tomorrow either, because tonight has been very quiet as well, and I am going to have to spend the cash on going to Booths.
Mark is home and he will not subsist on tomato sandwiches for very long.
