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Alistair and Bruni Our maze of country lanes continued rolling alongside bright green hedges lined with overhanging branches. Near the town of Jockey's End a sign read: Top Quality Horse Manure. It must have been from thoroughbreds. I didn't know there was a difference. Golden nuggets. We arrived at 4:30 in Tring Station and phoned Tina's parents but got the answering machine. Maybe they weren't home from work yet. Tring Station was not a very big place. "Let's see if we can find their house so we can leave a note for Tina and this bicycle magazine," I said to Sharon. Tina had given us her parent's address. We guessed where it was and cycled down a lane. A woman said the address I was looking for was the house across the street. Setting the magazine by the door I decided I may as well ring the buzzer. Tina's mom, Bruni, answered the door expecting the piano tuner. Seeing me, she said, "You don't look like the piano tuner. Unless you've changed an awful lot since I last saw you." I said, "I can tuna fish, but I can't tune a piano." I explained who we were and how we had met Tina and Marcus in Siena. Bruni immediately opened the garage to stow our bicycles and invited us inside. Her husband, Alistair, was not home from work yet. He worked in management for an architectural firm in London. (It must have been a good paying position. The train commute alone cost $7000 a year.) Alistair had a prestigious position -- he even met the Queen one time when she came to open one of the buildings he had designed. The Queen asked Alistair: "Did you design this building?" "Yes," Alistair said. He told us, "I would have liked to have said something more. Like 'Your dress is lovely,' but I couldn't as it was that terrible shade of blue she wears and it was repulsive. She must be the world's worse dressed lady." Bruni was a German born psychiatrist. She and Alistair had lived in South Africa for a time. That was where their son, Duncan, was born. They travelled around the world for a year when the children were aged five and two. Alistair was about to change gears and had given his notice at the architectural firm. He didn't want to call it early retirement even though he was fifty-eight. He just said he wanted to do something different. Starting in October he would be teaching one day a week, but hadn't looked too hard for other things. He said he would like to get involved in some third world project. Alistair was a sensitive man. Slugs were eating their vegetation, and rather than squish them he had put slug pellets out. As we sat at the picnic table in the courtyard, two slugs climbed nearby plants. He picked one up, looked at it, then set it down saying, "They should be dying." They looked quite healthy to me. Bruni told us later, out of Alistair's earshot, that their neighbour had come over one day and there were three slugs on the sidewalk. She asked, "Do you mind if I kill them?" Without waiting for a reply she stepped on each one in turn like a gleeful schoolgirl. Alistair had looked at Bruni and said, "I think I'm going to be ill." Another friend had teased Alistair: "Don't you know those pellets cause them to explode?" The monastery down the road was not likely to approve of either method. But I thought stepping on them was more humane than slow working pellets and to anything else that had the misfortune to dine on a slug with ingested pesticide. Alistair and Bruni had a mousetrap that caught the mouse live. They would then transport the mouse to the other side of the canal and let it go. I told them it was probably the same mouse they kept catching over and over. He just took the bridge and came back for another free meal. "The next time we catch one we're going to paint its toenails. That way we will know if it's the same one coming back," Bruni said. Alistair was creative and artistic. He had designed the new part of their house. Their address referred to their home as a cottage, but even without the addition it was huge. The addition attached to the main house in an L shape. It had a kitchen, dining room, living room, office, bathroom and bedroom. Quite the addition. The ceiling was an open beam A shape. An entire glass wall looked out onto the expansive lawn with trees and shrubs. Alistair and Bruni were on a self-imposed diet. They both were reasonably fit and trim but wanted to shed some pounds before summer to fit into their summertime clothes. For supper we had baked salmon. Alistair insisted on opening a bottle of wine for Sharon and I even though they couldn't indulge on account of their diet. I chose red since I like red better, even though Sharon told me it was a faux pas with fish. The salmon looked red to me. |
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