Country life
Something to talk about
Leanda de Lisle
If you look carefully, you'll find a little iron gate, jammed up against the shrubbery on the far west of the rookery. There is no pathway on the other side, but, if you make your way through the brambles, you should eventually come across a low hill covered in earth and the steps that lead down to the ice-house. Shining a torch at the bottom of the stairs reveals a wall of bricks that spiral upwards creating a room shaped like a stylised beehive. Below there is a drop into darkness. 'It's like a Minette Walters thriller,' I told my husband, when he took me there this week. 'Is there a body?' Not this time, it transpired, but, anxious to con- tain my disappointment, he told me that they had found a body elsewhere on the farm.
It was rather an awful story. A man had gone missing. 'Was he a nutter, darling?' `No, he was a family man.' The police had searched for him without success. Then, three weeks later, someone out walking a dog found his body. Rather horrifyingly, the poor man had been dead only a couple of days. I wasn't curious enough to find out why this was. But I confess I was a bit I can't believe that medical students turn into doctors.' annoyed that Peter had waited several weeks to tell me this story and if we hadn't made the trip to the ice-house he might not have told me at all. We live very quiet lives and what little news we have we exchange at bath time every evening. I can just imag- ine myself lying in my bath one evening and asking, 'Anything happen today?', and Peter saying, 'Absolutely nothing. Oh, actu- ally, yes. I noticed the coots having the most terrific fights on the lawn . . . ', when in fact he'd been dealing with policemen and mouldering corpses all day.
Still, I understand. Our days pass quickly, but the lack of excitement either encour- ages people to become obsessed with trivial gossip, or it makes them vague — and often it makes them both. Peter, in com- mon with my father, likes gossip to be at least 250 years old. There was a stage in our marriage when he would give me shock bulletins on who had slept with whom in the court of Louis XIV. I, on the other hand, prefer news to be exactly that. Friends will ring to tell me about their affairs, certain in the knowledge that the vicarious pleasure I get out of it will out- weigh any disapproval I might feel, but, better still, I will entirely forget what they have told me until they bring it up again. Why? Because their lives seem so far away that they may as well be living in the 18th century.
Equally, the events of the day often seem to be happening at the wrong end of a tele- scope. There was a rather embarrassing incident several weeks ago when a newspa- per editor's secretary rang me to ask whether I would like to come into the office for drinks on 1 May. I found myself saying, 'The first of May. That's about the time of my mother's birthday. What's this drinks party in aid of?"Er, it's the general election,' she elaborated helpfully. Well, of course I knew that. It was just that I thought the election was at least a month away. Nothing seems very immediate, unless, of course, it's happening on our doorstep. And so little happens there that our bath-time routine has itself become the subject of intense interest, with Mrs Bloggs in the stable cottage telling anyone who will listen that Peter and I sit in the bath rather than the bathroom — together.
I feel bad about this. Not because I worry about how she knows anything about our bath time. I may have said something like 'Let's go and have a bath, Peter' in front of her. Rather, I feel guilty that we aren't more interesting. A previous lady of this house used to lie under the horses at the hunt meet and demand that they took her then and there. But I really don't think I could get into bestiality. Murder, on the other hand . . . no, perhaps not. However, I might put a leg of pork in the ice-house, shut the door and ask Mrs Bloggs if she has noticed the little gate on the other side of the lane, and the way the rooks wheel over the mysterious hillock beyond. It will give us both something to talk about.
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