Читать книгу The Dolce Vita Diaries - Cathy Rogers - Страница 31

5 Leading double lives

It was to be our life. But we weren’t there yet. I was leading a schizophrenic life, half as a TV executive, and half as a budding Italian peasant. Jason, too, was in a strange hybrid life, our Italian plans seeming a chimera juxtaposed against the all too practical everyday duties of nappy changing. Occasionally for him these two worlds collided, as when he made a trip to Italy with Rosie in tow. Being there with her on his own, in the middle of winter (this one just didn’t seem to end), staying in the not very nice but very cheap B&B, was no easy feat. Rosie could still barely sit up by herself and the challenge of doing so on freezing cold marble floors was too much—so she’d preferred to be suctioned to Jason most of the day.

Jason had to go for two reasons: first, to check up on the building work on the house and, secondly, to prove that we lived there. Even though we didn’t.

Let’s take the relative ease of the first. We were having some fairly big work done to the house. It was not on the scale—thank God—of the total restructurings that many embark on and that we had so nearly done. But the house hadn’t been lived in for probably a decade and when it had been last inhabited, it was evidently by people who liked cooking in a tiny dark poky corner, hated the view and never had a bath.

The house, like most Italian country houses, was divided into two halves—the half where the animals lived and the half where the humans lived. The animal half was basically a huge lofty room—by lofty I mean you could have fitted in another whole floor just about—with tiny windows. In more recent years, it had been done up as what can only be described as a 1970s pizzeria—with pale pine wood cladding the walls and a disproportionately huge (and that’s hard in such a large room) open-plan brick fireplace.

This ‘pizzeria’ was the site of most of our major work—because this was the room where we thought we’d spend most of our waking hours. So we were changing the tiny windows into big French doors, putting in a big open-plan kitchen, getting rid of the fireplace and clad walls and opening the whole room up with a big archway entrance.

In the rest of the house, we were also changing the garage into our office, stealing one of the bedrooms to make a bathroom and opening up the erstwhile living room with another big archway, instead of its current plywood door. We were retiling all the floors, rewiring all the electricity, putting in a gas hob (which meant a big buried gas container in the garden), installing a septic tank, waterproofing the cellar, redoing the roof and the stairs and repainting and plastering pretty much everywhere.