They have gone.
Well, actually Lucy and the kittens have gone. Oliver is just at work and will be back later. We are at work as well, although it is still quiet, and it feels very much as though normal life is trying to slowly slip back into its comfortable groove.
Of course it is not quite like that, because there is still the New Year to go, and after that we have our real Christmas break, which is a week of untroubled tranquillity when all the tourists have buzzed off in early January. Lucy is coming back for that, because nobody bothers to commit crimes that week either, and Oliver won’t quite be back at school. I will have finished my assignment and handed it in, and apart from the kittens, it will be a week of soul-soothing peace for the restoration of our weary spirits.
Apart from the kittens, obviously. The kittens’ visits are like inviting a particularly malevolent poltergeist to share your teenager’s bedroom for a fortnight whilst you are busily engaged doing something important. They are very tiny but manage to be in every room, everywhere, all at the same time. Lucy says they have learned to open her kitchen door at home, to facilitate robberies of anything carelessly left on the work-tops. In our house, where there are very few doors, there are opportunities for many small but high-speed feline assaults on things you never thought you might mind being dashed to the floor and eaten. My hairdryer was on the floor this morning. I do not know how they did that. It is bigger than both of them.
I have just shouted at a customer who had spent all his money becoming intoxicated and then failed to have enough to fund his journey home. He thought this might be a jolly amusing thing, one of those misfortunes that can happen to anybody, ha ha, until he heard what I had to say about it.
He walked the rest of the way. I hope it rains.
Once everybody had slipped away this morning, Oliver to work and Mark to take the dogs up to the farm, a wonderful silence descended on the house, and when I had finished hanging up washing I slipped upstairs and sat down at my computer.
I have been writing my assignment.
It is a happiness I can hardly describe.
I am not sure that the actual writing is a happiness. I am trying to write a story which is based on a very horrible true story, and it is drawing me in until I am captivated by its tragedy. I am writing only things that I know to be true, that are based on the real-life accounts of the people who were present, and it is troubling and utterly fascinating all at once, because I am not writing a pretend story but watching a real one unfold.
It is so terrible and intriguing that I have kept breaking off from writing this to write a bit more, although when I do it makes me feel exhausted, because it is a difficult thing to write. You can’t cast an enchantment without being drawn into it yourself, and I am being drawn in, as irresistibly as a dried-up kitten accident towards a hoover.
I will put it on these pages when it has been marked, although I do not think really that you ought to read it. It is a love story and I have written it because I have got to write a critical analysis of it, which will be really easy to do. I am looking forward to that bit, because that is just about showing off cleverness and not at all about trying to make people feel troubled.
I am going to go and write a bit more. It is even more interesting than my knitting.
A bientot.
