Lucy has gone, and it is very quiet again.
I do not know why it feels so quiet without her, it is not as if she is exactly noisy, unless she has been drinking, after which she can get quite raucous, I can tell you. It is not so much a quiet, but a small emptiness about her corner of the house.
She had a cup of tea with us in the conservatory and left at lunchtime, the better for getting back home in good time to tidy up properly before she had to start being a police officer again.
Once she had gone it seemed as though the world had tilted on its axis a little bit. I know it is still Bank Holiday Monday, not that it makes a scrap of difference to us in our brave new world, but the world somehow felt a little different.
We might be coming towards some kind of ending.
I suddenly realised that very soon, after months and months of winter, very soon, in a week, in fact, our secluded little world is going to change.
Oliver is going to go back to school, and I might be able to drive a taxi again.
Obviously I could drive one now if I wanted, because it is one of the things that has not been made illegal, but there is no point because there is nowhere for anybody to go.
I have started to think about having a life again. In a very few days we will be going to Scotland, and Oliver will no longer be here.
It is almost alarming.
Once I had stripped all of the sheets off Lucy’s bed I went upstairs into the loft. I dragged Oliver’s suitcase down and tipped it out on the bed.
I am very pleased to say that some distant incarnation of me had been through the suitcase very carefully and washed everything. I had even ironed it neatly, so that instead of a muddy muddle, there was a sensible pile of clean folded clothes, only smelling a bit of loft.
How very splendid to have somebody thoughtful looking after me like that.
I extracted all of the trousers and let the hems down. They are now four inches longer than they were and only just fit, he must have grown a bit more whilst he was asleep last night.
I made him try the shirts on as well. He might have to roll the sleeves up on some of them. I told him that this was a cool thing to do but he was not convinced.
It will be fine.
After I had finished worrying about packing, I went downstairs and started to prepare my life for the fast-approaching day when I will be a wage earner in my very own independent woman right, and probably not have time to do domestic things any more.
I thought I should do them all straight away, and scrubbed the dog-smell off the conservatory sofa.
The dogs are not allowed to sit on the sofa. They are supposed to stay on the floor, which is not only heated, but supports a large cushion for their comfort and well-being.
Roger Poopy gets on the sofa when I am not looking anyway. He must like this very much because he seems to feel that it is worth braving my bellows of outrage and small outbursts of violence when he is discovered.
The result of such piratical activity is that the sofa has begun to hum with a faint odour of dog.
One of the consequences of bat flu, which saddens me very much at times, is that I have lost a very great deal of my sense of smell. You can get this back again if you hang about sniffing extracts of lemons and roses and other carefully selected smelly stuff that can be purchased at great cost from Scent Retraining Specialists.
I know about these because they are on the mighty Internet, but have not bought any. I have got a lemon tree in the conservatory and sniff it every time I walk past. Mostly it does not smell of anything, so I am glad I have not wasted £6.99 for Lemon Scent Extract to find out the same thing.
Regrettably, however, my olfactory sense seems to work very well indeed when it comes to the dogs, and the sofa had a memory of Roger Poopy in its very fabric.
An hour later this had been replaced by what seemed to me to be a faintly lemony odour of disinfectant, but which I have since discovered practically knocks you backwards when you come in at the door.
This has got to be an improvement.
I have taken a picture.
You can’t smell it in the picture, but you get the idea.
