Property of a Lady

Michael—


Can you possibly find time to drag yourself away from your ivory tower again and make another journey to Marston Lacy? We need a reliable account of what’s actually been done to Charect House so far. The builders went in three weeks ago, but they keep sending terrifying letters and faxes about planning restrictions, and admonitory notices relating to Listed Buildings, and asking if we know the true condition of the windows and the roof. If the surveyor’s report can be trusted, the Georgian windows are infested with coniophora puteana, and the roof has merulius lacrymans. That’s wet rot and dry rot respectively to the likes of you and me.

But we’re staying with the plan to spend Christmas in the house – Liz has ordered camp beds and oil lamps and says it will be the greatest fun to eat picnic meals and dine by candlelight and we won’t even notice the rubble and the mess. Also, it will be a good reason not to spend the holiday with the cousins. Personally, I’d rather have the cousins or even Liz’s godmother for the winter solstice than camp out in an English ruin, however elegant it might be.

So you’d better let me have the phone number of that place you stayed (Capering Cow? Prancing Bullock?) because I’m blowed if I’ll eat sandwiches on Christmas Day.

Still, the efficient Ms West emailed to say she bought the long-case clock and the rosewood table at the auction, so at least we’ll be able to tell what time of day it is.

Anyway, here’s the thing. I dare say you’re knee-deep in students – do they still ask you to their parties, and if so, do you know how rare that is? My students here would be dismembered in slow stages before they’d ask me to have so much as a cup of coffee, but then I’m a slightly balding, becoming paunchy, married man, and even in my youth I never looked like Keats, preparing to starve with romantic intensity in his garret.

So if you could abandon the students again I’d be forever in your debt. (I’m in everybody else’s, so one more won’t make much difference.) I need to be sure they aren’t wiring the electricity into the septic tank just for the fun of it, or installing the heating plant in the roof so it crashes through the ceilings one night like the falling mountain in Gilgamesh’s nightmare. Talking of nightmares, Ellie is still having those God-awful dreams, poor little scrap. One of the things that helps her, though, are your stories about Wilberforce. Last night she fell asleep smiling after Liz read the latest episode of how Wilberforce went on his holidays, but the mice sabotaged his luggage and towed the train off the track so he ended up in Oswaldtwistle instead of Devon, and with no swimming trunks. Where the hell is Oswaldtwistle, by the way? And did you ever try writing kids’ books? I bet Wilberforce would outsell Harry Potter.

But most nights Ellie wakes in a sobbing panic, apparently frantic with anxiety for ‘Elvira’. From which you’ll see we haven’t been able to get rid of Elvira yet. Two nights ago Ellie told Liz someone was trying to find Elvira, and when Liz asked to know a bit more – sort of going along with the fantasy in case she could find a way to dispel it – Ellie said it was the man with holes where his eyes should be. I don’t know about you, but that was enough to give me the creeps, never mind a seven-year-old.

Let me know about Charect. Liz sends love.

Jack

Michael did not really want to leave Oxford, which at that time of the year was rain-scented and chrysanthemum-tinted, but he could probably steal twenty-four hours.

Before he left, he sent Ellie a new episode of Wilberforce’s tribulations, in which the mice put on a display of street-dance, wearing baseball caps back to front, and thwarting Wilberforce’s attempts to disrupt the performance by tying him up with the strings from the cello and upending the tuba horn on his head.