Morning…wake up to hear MWB riding one of her hobby horses in the kitchen: ‘I asked for a tool box for my 21st, but my mother couldn’t believe I really wanted one, so she bought me a bone china dinner set instead. Fucken bone china!’
When I enter, PB is nodding in empathic counselor role. Wonder if he’s made any revelations of his own. When I asked him if he made the cake for supper last night, he sheepishly admitted that his ‘business partner’ had, and that he might ‘ask his business partner if he’d like to make another cake for tonight.’
Somehow, PB gets on to the subject of astrology (probably not a particularly far leap for him, really) and reveals that he’s a Virgo: ‘That’s why I’m raking leaves all the time, because I’m a Virgo with obsessive compulsive disorder.’
I admit that I’m a Virgo too, and he tells me that Brokeback ‘draws lots of spiritual people and Virgos to it.’ He asks if I thought the place might be run by a Virgo when I saw it, and I say, ‘The thought did cross my mind.’
He surreptitiously gives me a left over piece of cake for morning tea, perhaps as part of the secret confederacy of Virgos. I have a feeling I might be the favourite, actually, as the least demanding person there.
MWA joins the table and MWB takes her on over a paper of MWA’s she’s just read. She’s found something racist in it. The guns are drawn, and things quickly descend into an all-out spat.
‘It’s racist!’
‘No, it’s not!’
‘It’s fucken racist!’
‘No, it’s not, you dumb fuck!’ etc etc.
PB disappears down the backstairs, saying ‘If things are going to get political…’
On the first night, it was all a mutual admiration society – ‘I think you’re brilliant/you’re a genius’, etc. Somehow I had a feeling it was all going to end in tears. I don’t know where they find the energy for this kind of thing over breakfast.
(Just overheard: Staff member announcing that she's about to see her kid in her first school production: 'We're going with our digital cameras and our hearts on our sleeves.'
I don't have anything pithy to say, just wanted to drop in and say how much I've been enjoying reading this and that the guest house thing would drive me bananas too. I keep thinking about EM Forster's ladies in Florentine pensiones and the fundamental human dynamic being more or less exactly the same. You must be on your way home by now -- you seem to have survived it quite well.
Posted by: Pavlov's Cat | March 31, 2006 at 09:22 AM
Yeah, me too.
Posted by: Zoe | March 31, 2006 at 11:39 AM
Thanks...they must have been bolshie ladies. I was thinking more the missionary ladies of old, strange spinsters heading into darkest Africa and so forth.
Posted by: elsewhere | March 31, 2006 at 07:17 PM