Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(46)
When the two of them finally lumbered off toward the elevator, I approached the counter, hoping the woman behind it would roll her eyes, acknowledging that something really needed to be done about people like the Dunstons. She didn’t, though, so I decided I would hate her as much as I’d hated them. When she told me that her little stand didn’t serve regular brewed coffee, I hated her even more.
“I can do you a nice cappuccino,” she said. “Or an iced latte, maybe?” This last word was delivered to my back as I stormed out the door. Then it was up the street and around the corner to a real coffee place. The pierced and tattooed staff members scowled at my approach, and I placed my order, confident that they would hate the Dunstons as much as, or possibly even more than, they already hated me.
Rubbish
I don’t know why it is, exactly, but once Hugh and I settle in somewhere, we tend to stay put. All those years in France, and except for a single weekend in Arles, I never visited the lower half of the country. It was the same after our move to England. London, we knew, but everything outside it was a mystery to us, a sort of “out there” we planned to get to “one day.” That day arrived in the summer of 2010, when we visited some friends in West Sussex. They’d told us the South Downs were beautiful, but we weren’t prepared for just how beautiful; these massive, chalk-speckled hills so green they made our eyes cramp. The roads were narrow and bordered by trees that formed canopies overhead. All the houses had names, and that too seemed enchanting. Our friends live in what’s called the Old Manor, which is near a place called the Granary. Hugh and I stayed with them for only one night, but it was enough to convince us, in the way that horrible, childless couples can be convinced of such things, that we needed to sell our vacation house in Normandy and resettle in West Sussex as soon as possible.
After returning to London we got on the Internet and found two properties that were within our price range. The first was called Faggotts Stack and was located between the hamlets of Balls Cross and Titty Hill. Sight unseen it had everything going for it. I’d have bought it just as a mailing address, but Hugh wanted something more beat-up, so we eventually went with choice number two, a cottage. Built, they reckoned, some four hundred years ago, it had no heat except for fireplaces and portable electric radiators. Half the windows wouldn’t open, and the half that wouldn’t close let in rain that rotted the floorboards and promoted great patches of mildew that clung like frost to the crumbling walls. There’d been a pig in the backyard but it had passed away—“Died of shame,” Hugh guessed—that’s how trashed the two-acre property was, a minefield of broken crockery, spent shotgun shells, and beer-bottle caps.
Slumped on the edge of it was the two-story cottage. Originally made of stone, it had been patched with brick and then patched again with what looked like dirty snowballs. The ground-floor windows had panes the size of tarot cards, and those were nice, as were the interior walls, which were crisscrossed with beams. The ceilings had them too, all corroded by worms and beetles.
“We’ll take it,” Hugh told me, this while standing in the living room, before we’d even seen the second floor. What with such a bucolic view—sheep grazing in the shadow of these great, verdant hills—the work seemed inconsequential. “Give these people what they’re asking, and do it today so we can get started.”
If I had hesitated he would have left me. Because that’s how Hugh is. You do not stand in his way; this I learned a long time ago. I also learned to trust him, especially in regard to property. Aside from the view, he liked that the place had not been modernized: none of the Sheetrocked closets or prefabricated shower stalls you’d just have to rip out and redo. Because the house was Grade II listed, broken windows could be replaced but not double-paned, as that would keep out the historic cold. Gutters and chimneys could be repaired, but you couldn’t put skylights in the attic or even insulate the walls, as that would amount to smothering the original beams. Hugh asked if an interior kitchen door could be moved two feet to the left, and when the answer came it was not just “no” but something closer to “hell no.” It’s as though we had asked to have ice cubes in our wine, like, “Ick, who are you?”
We bought the house in late July and gave the previous owners three months to pack. I was out of the country when Hugh got the keys and the builders began what turned out to be a yearlong occupation. A lot of what they did was invisible. By this I mean drainage ditches and septic tanks. The ancient roof was taken off, and when it was put back on using the exact same lichen-covered tiles, it didn’t look any different. Rotten floorboards were pried up, the mildew problem was seen to, and then the plumber and electrician arrived.
While the builders worked on the cottage, Hugh lived in what used to be the stable but was later converted into a guesthouse, the kind you’d have if you wanted to either discourage guests or contain them in one spot while slowly depressing them to death. It was especially grim in the winter, when in order to get warm you had to stand directly before the fireplace. There you’d rotate like a stump of gyro meat and wonder when the next train could carry you back to London.
By the time I finally joined Hugh in the stable, it was December, and I began to notice the many things that had escaped my attention on my previous visit. For instance, there’s a gliding club a mile and a half away. On a website, its members rhapsodize about how peaceful it is. And they’re right, gliders are quiet. The propeller planes that tow them into the sky, on the other hand, are like flying chain saws, and on a clear day their presence could be almost constant.