Three Dont Tango 6

The mattress is on the floor in the corner of the kitchen. In the other corner is a tatty sink, above it one ancient tap dispensing cold water erratically. The door is open into the next room where there are a couple of chairs. Upstairs in a tiny room at the top of the stairs sleeps Cephren in his cot. The front bedroom contains two large packing cases. This is our very own first real home.
The darkness outside is very black. The nearest street lamp is four and a half miles away, and we are at the bottom of a valley.
Our mattress is on the cold floor, but Annabel is humming to herself because she is in her bed in her kitchen in her house with her man.
I am lying still, breathing as quietly as a field mouse, listening to the vast black silence set against the distant hiss of a waterfall tumbling from the lake behind the ruined farmhouse two hundred yards away.
The dark night is the only curtain slung across our windows. The November wind slices under the door and over the floor like a sharp knife as we huddle together under the blankets in our bed hidden by the secret valley darkness.


Two weeks later we are standing in a room full of people, bidding at the local auction for some furniture. We buy a large kitchen table; four chairs, and a chaise longue that catches my eye, and which I covet, bidding for it with a fierce intensity until the price rises almost astronomically to £8. We buy two carpets and another bed, and everything goes inside and on top of the car, back to our little hideaway, along the country road, chaise longue on the roof, until at the crossroads we turn in under the trees, and the car disappears from view as if a curtain has swung back across the entrance to our private lane. Down the hill, under the beech trees, along the side of the stone wall, round the last corner, and into the drive-way, with the feeling that one has just managed to escape some foul pursuer in the nick of time. The gate swings to, and the car comes to rest outside the front door. We are surrounded by the high stone wall, and no-one, no-one at all, knows we are here.
Secretly, behind our wall, we put the table in the kitchen. The chairs are ranged around it. All we need now is a cooker. The living room has a carpet over the concrete floor, and a real Edwardian chaise longue, and upstairs is a proper bed, so we can at last move into the bedroom.
We have hidden ourselves happily in a little married world.

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