Saying Good-bye to the Historical House

Ten days after his cancer diagnosis, Benedict Ambrose returned to the Historical Refuge from work to tell me that we will never again reside in the Historical House.

I had made a bolognese sauce, and this is an important point, for usually B.A. makes supper. However, it was Victoria Day in Canada, so I had the day off and (for once) thought it only fair that I should do the cooking.  Thank heavens.  If poor B.A. had had to come home with that news and then  shove a fish under the grill,  he may have burst into tears.

Fortunately, I am a good woman in a crisis. Although I am often overcome by the slings and arrows of daily existence, life-changing news leaves me cool, calm, and collected. I do not know why.

As it happened, I had had a chat with the housekeeper that morning, learned that there was an outside chance we wouldn't be back until Christmas (if ever), and then I resumed looking at properties on rightmove.co.uk.

So I told B.A. that I was sorry, boiled up some spaghetti noodles, served up dinner and watched The Good Place (without irony) for an hour. We said the rosary, and then B.A. went sadly to sleep and I went back to rightmove.co.uk.

The next day I threw a fit, but I was serene on the bad day itself, so that is something.

Historically the Lady of the Historical House moves on either because she has died or because her husband has. It will be so much more cheerful packing up our belongings with B.A. than it would have been had he died last year. If he hadn't gone to an eye specialist, B.A. probably would not have survived March. He would have gone to sleep, and that would have been that, and the postmortem would have been quite a shock to B.A.'s mum and little me.

Seen from that perspective, having to move out of the Historical House is not really that much of a big deal, even if it was built in the 17th century (with 18th century additions) and it has been our home for nine years.

I would rather keep Benedict Ambrose than the Historical House, and that's a fact.

In some ways, the Historical House was a very inconvenient place in which to live. The ceilings are oppressively low, and we could stand it only because we are rather short. The stairwells on either side are open to the rest of the staff, any workmen who come in and, technically, tourists although I never caught a tourist daring to ascend. The washing-machine had to be kept in the old Servants' Hall, which is in the cellar, so doing laundry meant long trudges to and from the attic.

The fire alarms sometimes went off for no reason in the middle of the night, often when we had guests. It was B.A.'s job to get out of bed, let in the fire brigade and turn off the alarms. When he was in hospital, that was my job, and the alarms "went into fault" THREE TIMES while B.A. was at his sickest.

Naturally we could neither paint nor plaster nor paper, and our searchings of conscience before hammering nails anywhere verged on the Jansenist. Meanwhile, in summer we had to keep an eye out for people setting fires in the fields, and in September we had to discourage conker-thieves from damaging the horse chestnut trees near the House, and year round we were woken by noisy dogs.

On the plus side, the Historical House was a joy to come home to, especially when the cherry tree was in blossom, and we had lots of space for guests. It may be a long time before we can have so many rooms again: a proper dining-room/guest bedroom, a proper guest bedroom, an office/guest bedroom, a library/guest bedroom. We could put up four guests at a time and sometimes did.

We also had a lot of dinner parties and hosted Sunday Lunches, both in the dining-room and, on warm and sunny days, on the front lawn. In latter years when Polish guests were in the house, I took to hanging a Polish flag from the balustrade for our outdoor parties. Apparently this--and our clothing--led to us all being mistaken for World War II re-enactors.

Our last dinner party, which featured Polish Pretend Son and his Fiancee, ended two days before the fatal pipe blew, flooding the bathroom and driving us from our home. Dear me. Come to think of it, this is the end of PPS's most stable Edinburgh home, too. Well, I always promised him a home he could smoke in.

The views, too. I will most definitely miss the views: the Firth of Forth from our kitchen window and Arthur's Seat from the dining-room. Fortunately, a day never went by when I didn't look out the kitchen window and marvel. Strangely, weeks went by without me going for any but the most cursory walk through the woods, and very rarely did I feel like tramping through the fields. I preferred to enjoy the great outdoors from the low-ceilinged inside.

What makes a house a home, I asked myself the other day, when I had made a short visit to the HH for fresh clothing. It isn't a matter of having one's stuff around, I decided. What makes a house a home are the memories it conjures up: memories of happy events like parties and of sad adventures like B.A.'s illness. We have lots of memories from the past nine-and-a-half years, and presumably when we pack up our stuff, we'll pack up the memories, too.

(In case you are wondering,  at the moment my most vivid memory of that House was getting B.A. out of the bathtub last autumn when he was suddenly too weak to stand on his own. I am sorry if that seems rather dark and brutal, but it is what it is. Life is tough, and at least B.A. survived in the end.  The only way I could get him out that day was to get into the bathtub myself behind him and pull him up. It was so incredibly dangerous for both of us, I don't understand why I didn't call an ambulance instead. At any rate, should you ever be in the same situation, don't do what I did. Call for paramedics because you might not be so lucky.)