Property of a Lady

It isn’t entirely silent, of course. No house ever is. And there’s still the constant drip of water somewhere. It started to annoy me after a while, but although I’ve explored the sculleries – grim, badly-lit caverns – all the taps were dry. I hope it isn’t something in the roof – I should think roofs cost the earth to mend – but if rain has got in and is leaking into the house somewhere, it will need to be dealt with.

I never realized before what a huge responsibility a house is! Harry and I used to talk about how we would have a cottage in the country after the war. We visualized log fires and latticed windows and chintz. We didn’t get as far as leaking roofs and rusting taps, or crumbling window frames. If Harry was here now, he would laugh my fears away and probably trace the source of the lonely dripping tap or pipe quite easily, either mending it himself or arranging for a plumber to do so.

But it’s an unsettling sound, that rhythmic drip-drip. I really do not like the thought of something dripping away somewhere in a dark, unreachable space . . . I don’t like, either, how regular the sound is – it’s almost like a small mechanism, or like someone lightly tapping a tattoo on the very tiny drum, or small, thick wings beating against a glass pane.

But whatever it is, I shall try to ignore it. I’ve made the library my headquarters. The Black Boar can provide a Thermos flask of coffee, together with a pack of sandwiches each day, so I shan’t have to return there for lunch. It’s bitterly cold in the house, of course – the cold of a house unheated and unlived-in for forty years – so I have arranged for a small delivery of logs (the taxi driver has a brother-in-law who can supply them). Providing it doesn’t smoke out the entire house, I shall build a fire in the library hearth.

20th February 2.30 p.m.

I’ve had a very useful morning, and quite soon I shall lock everything up and go out to meet my friend the taxi driver who is going to pick me up here at four o’clock.

The logs duly arrived midway through the morning, and I’ve built a fire in the library hearth. It smoked furiously for about ten minutes, but now it’s settled down to a very pleasant crackle and the room is nicely warm.

I’ve even set the old clock going. The hinges of the door protested like a soul in torment, but they aren’t rusted and the pendulum with its weight turned out to be perfectly workable. When I touched it, it moved at once, and (I know how fantastical this sounds) it was as if a heart was struggling into life after a long stillness. And then the rhythmic ticking began, and I reached up to move the hands to the correct time and closed the door.

I dare say a good deal of craft went into that clock, but I don’t much like it. To my eye it’s Victorian workmanship at its most florid. It has one of those vaguely macabre faces over the main dial – a swollen moon-face, which I suppose marks the passing of the moon’s cycle. The sphere representing the moon has been lightly marked to indicate features – like children’s books with the Man in the Moon smiling benignly down from the night sky. The face is half visible, which I suppose means it was midway between moons when it stopped. Still, at least the ticking seems to have smothered the dripping tap. Perhaps it’s ticking exactly simultaneously with it.