He grinned. ‘Either I am, or else I’m pretending to be in order to get my Christmas cards written and posted for me every year. I guess you’ll never know which is the truth.’
Floor-length cream silk curtains. Kit wanted a Roman blind, but I overruled him. Silk curtains are something I’ve wanted since childhood, one of those ‘as soon as I have a home of my own’ pledges I made to myself. And curtains in a bedroom have to pool on the floor – that’s my look-right rule. I suppose everybody has at least one, and we all think our own are sensible and other people’s completely ridiculous.
Above the fireplace, there’s a framed tapestry of a red house with a green rectangle around it that’s supposed to be the garden. Instead of flowers, the solid colour of the grass is broken up by stitched words: ‘Melrose Cottage, Little Holling, Silsford’ in orange, and then, in smaller yellow letters beneath, ‘Connie and Kit, 13th July 2004’.
‘But Melrose isn’t red,’ I used to protest, before I gave up. ‘It’s made of white clunch stone. Do you think Mum was picturing it drenched in blood?’ Kit and I called our house ‘Melrose’ for short when we first bought it. Now that we’ve lived here for years and know it like we know our own faces, we call it ‘Mellers’.
What would an impartial observer make of the tapestry? Would they think Kit and I were so stupid that we were in danger of forgetting our names and when we bought our house? That we’d decided to hang a reminder on the wall? Would they guess that it was a home-made house-warming present from Connie’s mother, and that Connie thought it was twee and crass, and had fought hard to have it exiled to the loft?
Kit insisted we put it up, out of loyalty to our home and to Mum. He said our bedroom was the perfect place, so that then guests wouldn’t see it. I don’t think he notices it any more. I do – every night before I go to sleep and every morning when I wake up. It depresses me for a whole range of reasons.
Someone peering into our bedroom would see none of this – none of the wrangles, none of the compromises. They wouldn’t see Kit’s missing bedside table, the picture I’d have liked to put above the fireplace if only the hideous red house tapestry weren’t there.
Which proves that looking at a room in someone else’s house doesn’t tell you anything, and there’s no point in my doing what I’m about to do, now that I’m sure Kit’s sound asleep. I ought to go to sleep too.
As quietly as I can, I fold back my side of the duvet, climb out of bed and tiptoe to the second bedroom, which we’ve turned into a home office. We run our business from here, which is a little absurd given that it’s about eleven feet long by ten feet wide. Like Kit’s and my bedroom, it has a cast-iron fireplace. We’ve managed to cram two desks in here, a chair for each of us, three filing cabinets. When our certificate of incorporation arrived from Companies House, Kit bought a frame for it and hung it on the wall opposite the door, so that it’s the first thing that catches your eye when you walk into the room. ‘It’s a legal requirement,’ he told me when I complained that it looked uninspiring and bureaucratic. ‘Has to be displayed at company headquarters. Do you want Nulli to start life as an outlaw?’
Nulli Secundus Ltd. It means ‘second to none’, and was Kit’s choice. ‘Talk about tempting fate and dooming us to failure,’ I said when we were discussing what to call ourselves, imagining how much worse liquidation would feel with such a conceited name. I suggested ‘C & K Bowskill Ltd’. ‘Those are our names,’ Kit said scathingly, as if this fact might have passed me by. ‘Have a bit of imagination, for God’s sake. Confidence would help, too. Are we launching this company in order to go bankrupt? I don’t know about you, but I’m planning to make a success of it.’
What else have you made a success of, Kit? What else that I don’t know about?
You’re being ridiculous, Connie. Your ridiculousness is second to none.
I tap my laptop’s touchpad and it springs to life. The Google screen appears. I type ‘houses for sale’ into the search box, press enter, and wait.