I have been quietly missing Oliver and hoping that he is getting along all right and not sad or homesick or lonely.
He is a very long way away.
Lucy rolled her eyes and said I had been watching too many films in which families expressed their unsympathetic cruelty by dispatching their hapless offspring off to boarding school, and that Oliver would be perfectly fine and having a magnificent time.
A brief conversation with him later assured me that everything was brilliant but he had to go because he was having a water fight with Finlay so he would talk to me another time.
I went round the house collecting everything he had forgotten and bundling it into a parcel to post off to Duffus for him. It included Spider-Man. Spider-Man has lived on Oliver’s bed in his various school dormitories for ten years now, and I was quite sure that he would still like to have his company even though he is now eighteen.
The lady at the post office nodded sympathetically. Posting Oliver’s forgotten things is something of a beginning-of-term ritual, like sewing in name tapes and poking the toes of his shoes and frowning at how far along them his feet have grown.
Apart from that there was a very great deal of laundry.
There was laundry from Manchester and Scotland and all of Oliver’s sheets from his bedroom and all of the sheets upon which the tiresome cat had been sick.
Talking of cats, they caught a mouse in the back yard today.
This was truly terrible.
I do not know what they did to it but we found it wriggling and shrieking, observed with dispassionate interest by both cats and the dogs, who had gathered around to consider it thoughtfully, like a table of bridge players when somebody has suddenly made an unexpectedly reckless bid and they are not quite sure whether he means it or whether he has simply been having nips out of a hip flask under the table.
The cats were patting it occasionally, trying to persuade it to get up and run, but its back was broken.
I had to shoo them all away and hit it with the axe. It was not a very nice moment, and I was uncomfortably reminded of poor Thomas Cromwell at the end of the third book, which I read very slowly because of not wanting to get to that bit. I do not at all want to have mice loitering about the premises, but it seemed like a thoroughly unpleasant end, although not, perhaps, as unpleasant as the one suffered by a mouse I watched being carried off by a crow the other day. That one was pinned down on the gatepost and its insides eaten. I think it was dead by then, fortunately.
Nature is not very kindly.
The adventure has sharpened the cats’ interest in hunting considerably, and they spent all of the rest of the day prowling hopefully around the back yard, coming in occasionally to hunt for pieces of ham on the work surfaces. Roger Poopy still has hopes of a carnal adventure with Rosie, even though everybody keeps bellowing at him not to, and when he tried it yesterday they got stuck together. Rosie, whose interest in such events has now faded again, promptly ran off, dragging poor Roger in her wake, yelping and hopping behind her. I am sorry to say that we laughed, which was heartless. It made him bleed, but he has not given up. The longing is simply too overwhelming, hopeless as it is.
Nature has got a lot to answer for, I can tell you.
We do not think that Rosie has managed to conceive. Her new partner must not have managed it before his misfortune struck him, whatever it was, so she will remain unpuppied for another season. She has become very subdued and gloomy, as if she knows that something has slipped through her paws. Poor Rosie. She is desperate for something small to love, and Roger Poopy really doesn’t qualify, being large, ungracious and smelly.
She mothers him anyway.
I am afraid that is nature again.
In other news, I am back on the taxi rank. I have not yet made a million pounds otherwise I would have gone home, but we are beginning slowly to recoup the costs of the week’s recklessness, and it is superlatively lovely to sit here, with no exciting challenges lurking about waiting to be overcome, and nowhere that we have got to go. It is peaceful.
We are not going anywhere at all until the next time I go off to Cambridge.
That is ages yet. It is going to be a very quiet few weeks.
I do hope so.
