I may not have been on professional top form last night.
A couple got in the taxi and asked to go to the Bonnie Brae guest house.
The name was vaguely familiar, but I asked them just to remind me where it was. There was a brief silence, and then the man, who turned out to be the owner, said: “Er, it’s opposite your house.”
Mark did not come to work last night because he spent a great deal of the night mending the other taxi. He did not finish it, much to our joint despair, because of desperately needing it to be back on the road by tonight to earn us enough money to pay the mortgage. When I woke up this morning I found that he had already got up and gone off back to the farm again.
This was a feat which impressed me very much, because not only had he managed to get up and go without disturbing either me or the dogs, but he had also managed to dress himself without the assistance of my advice and support. This is usually quite beyond him, mostly he wanders about for ages in the mornings, saying things like: “Are these my socks?” and not knowing where the clean trousers are if I don’t interfere.
This meant a quiet start to the day. I took the dogs for a hurried outing around the Library Gardens in the torrential rain, fortunately I wore my flip flops, which meant I still had dry shoes later, but I had to change absolutely everything else. Even the dogs, who are enthusiastic sniffers whatever the weather, ignored all the interesting patches of everybody else’s wee and just dashed round and scurried back to the house door as fast as they could, and then dried themselves messily on the carpet as soon as they were inside.
I was terribly glad that I was warm and safe inside our dry house, and not out in Mark’s dreadful ghastly shed mending a car. I tidied up and did the washing and swept the hearth, and then settled down with a clear conscience to the joyfully absorbing task of curtain manufacture.
This was a glorious activity, because it all went exactly as it should but never usually does. I measured and cut and trimmed and pressed, and by the time I had to get ready and go to work I had got four curtains and their linings neatly cut out and hemmed and ready to be made up together at a later point.
Mark came back for coffee in the late afternoon, oily and despondent. The car was progressing very slowly and not likely to be ready until late, which was awful, because of course the longer it was off the road, the longer – on our busiest night – it was not earning anything, and the spectre of ruin began to hover over us.
When I went to work I took him back to the farm and waited for a few minutes whilst he changed a headlight bulb in the taxi, and felt terribly anxious and gloomy. It is pitch dark at the farm, because the council feels no need to invest in street lighting for the benefit of sheep and the occasional farmer who probably goes to bed with the sun anyway, and Mark’s shed was bleakly grim. It was raining hard, and the wind was howling.
It really did sound like the shrieking phantom voices beloved of those Victorian novelists who used to represent the inner cataclysms of their heroines by describing meteorological events. I had a bit of an inner cataclysm of my own just listening to it. It was horrible, and made me shudder with the unforgiving icy bitterness of the night, if I had been a Bronte sister I would have been putting determined pressure on my father to get a congregation in Dorset or somewhere, and as it was I was jolly glad that I had had the good fortune not to be born a sheep.
This all sent me into paroxysms of worry, and it was fortunate for all concerned that after I went to work and Mark carried on wearily labouring in his shed, that all the mobile phones in the area stopped working due to some arcane difficulty with the signal. Had it not been for this he would have not been able to get on at all because of answering the phone to me being worried every ten minutes.
In the end I went back to the farm at about half past nine with a tub of power steering fluid, to find his little workshop area brightly lit, the dogs curled up asleep on his coat, and the car engine humming nicely as he fastened the last bolts.
It was done, and now we are both out on the taxi rank, frantically trying to make up for lost time.
The mortgage is due on Monday.
We’ve got ages yet.
