Читать книгу The Desperate Diary of a Country Housewife - Daisy Waugh - Страница 7

We’ve found it. Finley and I have just got back from a day trip to Paradise, and the long, long search is over. At last.

This one may not have a moat around it, or any ramparts, and it’s probably a four-hour drive from London. But it has the same magical, forgotten feeling as the house from the dream that I had, and when I saw it—when I turned the final corner of that winding path and looked up, and saw it properly for the first time—I swear it was so lovely it took my breath away.

The house is in the middle of a small village and just three miles up the road from a beautiful, old-fashioned market town. It perches alone, big and solid and perfectly symmetrical, on a hill so steep and so high above the village road that when you look up towards it all the proportions seem distorted. Actually it reminds me of an Addams Family cartoon: quite grand, in a way, though clearly dilapidated; with a stone porch, and in front of the porch a stone terrace, and in front of that a stone carved balustrade, drowning in jasmine and honeysuckle and ivy.

It has more bedrooms than we need, and more sitting rooms, and more cellars and underground vaults and cupboards and attics and cubbyholes than we’ll ever know what to do with. But the children can build camps in them. That’s the whole point. Or they can attach a rope ladder to the wall at the top of the back garden, and escape into the fields on the other side.

Not only that; it’s only a few miles—almost bicycling distance—from the train station, which means, on a more practical note, that Fin can travel up and down to his office in Soho almost as easily as if he were taking the tube from Shepherds Bush. In fact everything about the house is so perfect, so romantic and so good for the trains, it seems quite peculiar that we can even afford it. Houses in this corner of the world are far from cheap. What with one thing and another—the beautiful, protected countryside, the trains that carry people so easily back and forth to Soho and the City—this is probably one of the most expensive corners of rustic paradise in England.

Maybe the fact that you can’t get a car to the door might put a few people off. We both positively like that. It makes the place feel more secluded. In any case, with or without the access, this house could hardly be described as a cheapie and we are fully prepared to encumber ourselves with a monumental mortgage.

God knows, of all the options we’ve considered, the South West of England is hardly the most adventurous…but. But. But. But. It works. The schools are good. The house—I think I dreamed of. And in any case, whatever happens, however it turns out, we’ve been festering in London for far too long. It’s about time we had an adventure.

We put our London house up for sale within the week, and made an offer for the Dream House that afternoon. It was rejected out of hand. So we upped the bid. They didn’t even bother to respond. Two days later we saw the house advertised in the Sunday Times. So we sulked for a few days and then upped the bid again. And again.