Home life
Open house
Alice Thomas Ellis
Astrange man appeared in the garden Yesterday, mouthing and gesticulating at the dining-room window while someone Was quietly eating his lunch and reading the paper. 'Are you expecting a person in a brown coat?' I asked. 'No,' he said, 'Tell Min to go away' — or words to that effect. So I went to the laundry-room door and leaned out. `Yers?' I enquired, very lady of he Manor. And he said he'd been observ- ing the house for some time, it appeared to be unoccupied which was a pity as it had
some potential, and did I know if it was for sale.
Now there are three cats, three adults, 9ne teenager and a child actually resident in this house. Janet comes in every day, Maureen comes once a week to do the !ntigh, Letitia comes to din some French Imo the head of the teenager, and every !Ingle day each one of us is visited by at least one friend — in the case of the teenager it's more like 15 as they're at the age Where they travel about in hordes, ,SettlIng in different places until the house- !older loses patience and slings them out. People come to lunch and dinner, the stman plods up twice daily, Eric delivers 'ne papers each morning, men come to read the gas meter or cut off the electricity, artiS ans arrive to mend things and on the 1.,te occasions when no one else is about tinkers nip in to pinch anything left lying al:ound. Once they stole a basket full of dirtY laundry and helped themselves to the contents of the freezer. They were starting Co the china when someone heard them aml came down to intervene. One of the 6 they took from the freezer was an ni.nlabelled bag of pet food — processed la.ngaroo, salmonella flavour I should — and I do so hope they ate it. When, I asked myself, could this man !lave been watching the house? Surely not In the evening when, the young being what tbl!eY are, every room in the place is left „lazing with light, disco music roars from "le top floor, the television is twittering away to itself in the drawing room and I'm r'Vn here clashing dishes and listening to he Archers on the wireless. Maybe he comes round at dead of night, but even then someone is frequently burning the 1tInight oil and Cadders is either prowling Lite wall, or inside trying conclusions with the other cats. The house is seldom what Y,011 could describe as really quiet. I asked anet what she thought and she said maybe It was because we didn't have any curtains. I said indignantly that we jolly well did — great big velvet ones, and she said we didn't have net curtains. But nor do the neighbours. When you get bored with the telly you can walk up and down watching
Intimate domestic dramas being played out through tasteful picture windows in through-plan semi-basements. Admittedly the garden is looking a bit grotty at the moment but no garden looks its best in mid February, and when we've gathered up the waste paper that blows in from the market and collected the chicken 'n' chips packets and VP wine bottles that the indigenous population disposes of over the wall it looks quite neat. I agree the exterior could do with a lick of paint, but newly painted houses look misleadingly prosperous (once you've decorated the front you've po money left) and invite professional burglars.
I expect you're wondering why I spoke to this potential buyer through the laundry door. There are six doors to this house if you count the french windows but they're all burglar-proof and if you lose the keys they're householder-proof too and you can't open them, so we all go in and out through the laundry. Jeff is always greatly impressed by the quantities of clean shirts hanging on a rail over the boiler, but, as I've said, we cater for three cats, three adults, one teenager and one child and that leaves a lot of washing even when the tinkers have taken half of it.
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