The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2307 by Angharad Copyright© 2014 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

On the Saturday before Hilary’s visit I really was a slave driver making everyone contribute to tidying up the house. It wasn’t knee deep in cobwebs or anything, but it needed a touch of elbow grease to shine polished surfaces, vacuum carpets and mop other floors. I also managed to get the girls to tidy their rooms and bring their washing down.

It sort of stayed fine, well enough to mostly dry the washing the rest of which was done in the airing cupboard on the top floor. It’s more like a laundry room with a hot water tank in it and much bigger than in a modern house, if they have an airing cupboard at all. These new combi boilers do away with the need for a hot water tank, or so they claim. Personally, despite them being more environmentally friendly, I prefer the old fashioned system with the hot water tank—yeah you could say, I like being in hot water.

For Sunday, David and I had discussed a menu and agreed on a suitable one. Most people have a roast on a Sunday, we were going to, but a roast salmon. David has this amazing way of doing it with foil in a special sauce he makes which includes dill and parsley—it is delicious. I checked with Hilary that she ate fish—not everyone does, nor do they eat salmon, however without revealing too much more about lunch, I couldn’t ask any further questions.

She arrived on Sunday on time in her old car. Trish couldn’t wait to see what she looked like. I told her she was a big fat hunchback with an ugly face. When she saw that I’d misled her she grumbled but was delighted how normal Hilary looked. Then she looked at me, and muttered something about looking normal was no guarantee as my appearance would prove.

I decided I wouldn’t pursue the idea as she can get worse as well as better. She spoke of a headache, which could only be a migraine sort of pain complete with visual distortion, the way she described it. I’d never known her suffer from migraines before, so wondered what had caused this to happen. If they persisted, I’d have to take her to the doctor. Not being a headache person, nothing much up there to hurt, this was all new to me.

The migraine had started as she went to bed but stopped an hour or so later when she was sick. I asked her about things she’d eaten and she’d had some cheese and dark chocolate the evening before, so either of those could act as a trigger as could a number of other things. As I could easily be looking for needles in the wrong haystack, I decided to leave it to the doctor to sort if it recurred.

I believed some girls got it when they started a period, but that wouldn’t apply to Trish, so I scratched that one off the list. She seemed bright enough when she was rushing about to greet Hilary, so I assumed she was okay.

Once in the house, I had to introduce her to the four mouseketeers, then to Cate. Julie managed to wander through still in her pyjamas and then feigned embarrassment that I hadn’t told her we had a visitor. Phoebe knew all about it, so I was pretty sure that Julie would too. She dashed upstairs and showered and changed.

Phoebe was sitting reading the colour supplement from the Sunday paper and acknowledged Hilary’s presence with a wave. Jacquie was looking after Lizzie and was a bit too busy to indulge in a small talk—Lizzie had just pooed herself. The smell of it precluded lingering with her.

David told me, ‘fifteen minutes’ before he’d bang the gong. Which enabled Sammi to appear looking for a dictionary, as she couldn’t find some word online. I had three or four in my study assuming no one had borrowed one. A Chambers, an Oxford, a Collins plus a Webster’s. I believe he was one of the people who caused American and British English to differ—silly old fool.

“You have a study?” asked Hilary, then answered her own question. “I suppose I should have expected that.”

“Why?”

“Well you’re loaded and live in a big house.”

I couldn’t fault the logic.

“May we see it?”

“My desk wasn’t very clean, though that was partly from a rush of sightings of different rodents over the previous weekend and partly because I’d not had time to sort everything neatly away. Normally, I file everything in order, partly because it means I might find it again and partly because the files now fill half a four drawer filing cabinet and that was just on rodent sightings. Plus the thousands of records I had on mice in general stored on discs and other devices. Normally I could identify a previous record in seconds, so if a question of a previous report being quoted twice arose, I could usually track down an original in moments, especially with the software Sammi had modified to do such things. She devises or designs data bases and their protection so what seemed like miraculous to me was no effort for her level of skill.

She was still in the study when we arrived and she had to take more interest in our guest. I left them chatting for a few minutes while I checked on the meal. It was ready for eating.

We ate in the dining room, which is what it’s for, but with nearly twenty places up for grabs the table looked like a banqueting hall. Trish and Livvie laid the place settings. That sounds posh, it isn’t it just meant a place mat with eatin’ irons. Tom sat at the end of the table, at the head and Stella and I sat below him, mainly so I could organise distributing the meat I’d asked him to carve. I was also nominally the hostess or mistress of the house. Despite it being the twenty first century, we were quite old fashioned in many ways.

Luncheon was served with a small amount of paté as starter, with this came a couple of small biscuits which David had actually baked this morning. Those were beautiful and were like thin unleaven savoury cakes.

Next came the salmon with new potatoes and tender stem broccoli, green beans and baby carrots. That was lip smacking gorgeous. For dessert he provided a fruit puree thing with Greek style yoghurt. I ate two of them they were so moreish. Finally, we had cheese and biccies with coffee to follow. It not only impressed Hilary, it did the girls too—they actually were quiet over the meal, so my fears of Hilary being buttonholed by Trish demanding her take on Quantum Physics was uncalled for. Trish was feeling sick as a parrot while I ate myself silly.

However, I knew that Trish was just waiting for a moment to launch another attack and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to prevent it. Oh the joys of clever kids...