He led her back through the garden, through the unfamiliar and the familiar and into the cosy warmth of the kitchen. He took her coat and hat and, together with his own, hung them on the stand. He looked in on Rory; the pups had now returned to their place in the crook of her foreleg. Lifting the receiver of the phone, which hung on the kitchen wall, he made a brief call to the vet and asked if he could arrange a home visit to check to make sure that all was well with the dog and her brood. Chani had returned to her former place on the stool and he did likewise. He sat down on the stool opposite from her and let out a long sigh.
"Won't the vet mind, coming out to Rory?" She asked.
"This be farming country, lass," he said in a mock West Country accent. "The farmers can scarcely lead a cow by the nose into a veterinary surgery, populated by rabbits and guinea pigs, dogs and cats. The vet will simply include me in his endless rounds treating mastitis, getting crushed between gate and cow, testing for BSE and tuberculosis and extracting reluctant, and breech presenting, calves from their mothers with the aid of some rope and a good deal of muscle power; I, and Rory, will be a welcome change to his routine grunting and groaning." He laughed. "Actually he is both a friend and my vet. He was so keen to learn about the possible diseases of my birds, bumblefoot, sour crop, parasitic infection of various organs by worms and suchlike, when he first came here, that he is now a widely acknowledged expert in the field. His curiosity was first piqued when I told him that I was applying the same cream that people use when they have piles to a mild case of bumblefoot in the absence of any knowledgeable vet in the area. Would you like some hot soup or a hot drink to warm yourself up?"
"No, thanks," she said. "I am warming up quite nicely. Why is she called Rory? Rory is a boy's name, surely."
"Yes, it's an Anglicised translation of the Gaelic and means 'Red King'," he replied. "Although there is a precedent, one of Bobby Kennedy's daughters, you know, JFK's brother who was also shot and killed, was called Rory. Rory's named in memory of Rory Gallagher, whom I adore, one of the truly great guitarists of the twentieth century, who was both Irish and had red hair. Sometimes, the dog gets called 'Fecking Eegit', which is Irish slang for 'Fucking Idiot' because, on the whole, she is! Mostly, she gets called 'Eegit' for short. The Eleonora's falcon that you saw on the weathering earlier is called 'Eegit' for the same reason. Fortunately for me, falcons don't usually answer to their name, just food or a whistle, so there is little, if any, confusion."
"Well, I've seen your studio, your kitchen and your garden. Do I not get a tour of the rest of the house?" She asked.
"By all means!" He said and he ushered her from room to room on the ground floor. The dining room, bare except for a huge, quartered-walnut veneered dining table and chairs and a tall, narrow display cabinet with glazed doors, in which was displayed, as he had said, his matt black coffee set with the glossy gold figure of the phoenix, stenciled onto the ground. From there, they went into the lounge with its red, antique leather chesterfields and one similar chair grouped around two mahogany occasional tables, inlaid with what she took to be satinwood, so like the crumpled fabric did it seem to her; bookcases filled with books lined the two longer of the four walls, fronted by paneled doors, some with glass panels, some with matching wood. However, pride of place had been given, at one end of the room, not to a giant-sized TV in keeping with the size of the living space but two huge speaker cabinets, much taller than she was, filled with many smaller speakers which could clearly be seen; the front grilles had been removed. Perched on a low, thick plate-glass table, whose legs of chromed steel seemed to float an inch above the floor, there was, centred between and slightly behind the two enormous cabinets, what looked like relics from an age long since past. There was a record player for vinyl discs and three chrome boxes, caged in chrome mesh, through which could be seen large glass tubes; these surely could not be valves, she thought, valves had disappeared from electrical equipment not long after she was born. Below, on a shelf was, what appeared to be, a radio and a cd player.
As they crossed the room to a door on the other side, they passed close by the strange boxes and she peered more closely through the mesh cage of one. She was now also close enough to the table to discern that the legs terminated in thin, needle pointed spikes and were not held up by air, or magic, as she had first thought.
"My first and probably my last gratuitous indulgence," he said smiling. "After my first 'west end' exhibition, in which everything had sold and I had commissions coming out of my ears, I was so flush with money that I bought the contents of this entire room bar the actual books and CDs. The sofas and the tables are genuine antiques and cost a packet. I won't tell you how much the hi-fi cost in total but that little record player, only the actual deck, you understand, was a shade under £2,500 nearly twenty years ago; just the arm alone was £800. The amplifiers, one pre-amp, the one with three knobs on it and the two power amplifiers, one for each stereo channel, are valve not transistor and shove out the sort of heat usually reserved for large electric fires or industrial furnaces; replacement 'tubes' have to be specially ordered and, likewise, cost an arm and leg! Does sound good though! Isolated as I am, I get to turn the wick up to concert hall volumes; Wagner or Mahler, Black Sabbath or Deep Purple and, especially, Bach organ fugues are simply amazing and spectacular. You can have a listen later when you've finished your tour!"
He led her through a side door to the lounge and into a room which, in comparison to the size of the other rooms, was much more modest, more the size that she, inner city dweller that she was, was used to. As in the lounge area, books lined the walls; reference books. Thesauri; dictionaries in at least 5 languages including the 20 volumes of the OED; biology, anatomy and computer science textbooks; primers in quantum mechanics and organic chemistry; books on CAD and computer animation. However they were housed on open shelves, not in bookcases. Beneath the window stood a contemporary styled desk of the sort that you might find in a modern, open-plan office, a tower-style, desktop computer stood at each side of the desk. On top of the desk, was the largest computer monitor that she had ever seen, more like a TV set, so wide was it, a keyboard and mouse and what seemed like an A4 drawing tablet and pen. This was the study, he informed her; where he wrote, played computer games and tried desperately to come to terms with drawing on a computer screen, although with only sporadic and marginal success.
"So, do you like my little house?" He enquired. He saw little point in giving her a tour of the upper floor, she had already seen the studio and one bedroom was very much like another in his estimation. His bed, a charming four-poster in oak with voile curtains, was truly stupendous and probably was worthy of a viewing but he had little desire to add to the flow of 'double-entendres' which had issued from her during their long walk back to the house by showing it to her.
"I hate to say it, but yes; most definitely yes! You must earn a positive mint to be able to afford all this!"
"No, not really," he said. "Most of the work done, and the things that I own, these all go back years; I've been here for over twenty years now. My partner, during much of that time, earned an exceedingly good salary; she consulted on a freelance basis and was not only very good but also very much in demand. I had a steady and, strangely enough in my line of work, largely predictable income. Commissions came in at a steady rate and an exhibition was a bonus windfall to be savoured. We could afford many of life's little luxuries. Now, unless it is for a good client, I try to keep the commissions down to manageable levels, I am too long in the tooth now for the kind of eighteen hour days, seven day weeks of my youth, and, generally speaking, my income just about keeps pace with my modest expenditure.
"The house is paid for; I am largely vegetarian, although scarcely vegan, and I grow much of my own food from seed for pennies; the cost of my artwork more than covers the raw materials used in their creation; except for any initial costs for purchase, my birds are cheap to feed and maintain, the vet is usually paid in paintings and now has a healthy collection; heating the house is expensive but I have insulated it the best that I can and the cost is a minimum for something of this size; I have little interest in fashion, the clothes that I am wearing today I probably bought ten years ago; I have few vices. I don't smoke, I don't drink alcohol an awful lot, preferring a little of quality as opposed to an excess of the mundane; I have more music in the form of CDs and vinyl than I can usefully listen to; there are seldom books which catch my eye nowadays and so I re-read the classics, when I want to read. These I already possess or they are freely available on gutenberg.com, being out of copyright. Even holidays are short, cheap weekends away in some interesting city like Rome or Prague; I have had my fill of the exotic, Mauritius, the Seychelles, St Lucia, the wildlife safari in Botswana. If I want a longer break, I combine it with a field trip; at the very least I can always write that off against my annual tax bill, providing that I have the sketch books to prove that it was really work! I spend every holiday filling sketch books anyway; it's what I do to relax. Another gin and tonic?"
She nodded her head vigorously and he guided her back to the kitchen.
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