‘Sold the cottage. Well, you said you didn’t mind.’
‘It was your decision,’ Slider said, but he feared that his father, old and commercially innocent, might have been rooked. He wished he had waited until Slider could help him. ‘I hope you got a decent price for it,’ he said anxiously.
‘Don’t worry. Your old dad’s not so green as he’s grass-looking. Listen, Bill, there’s something I want to ask you. But I want you to promise to say no if you feel that way. There’ll be no hard feelings. You just be honest with me.’
‘Dad—’
‘No, let me say my piece. I bin practising,’ he said with a smile in his voice. ‘I know you and Joanna are looking to move, and I was wondering whether we couldn’t throw in together, and get a place a bit bigger, with room for me. A granny-flat or whatever they call it. I don’t need much – just a bed-sitting room with a gas ring, and a bathroom.’
‘Oh, Dad, it would be lovely, but—’
‘I wouldn’t be underfoot, don’t you think that. You wouldn’t even see me unless you asked to. But I’d like to be closer, now I’m getting on a bit. And, see, I could stop in for the gas man, that sort of thing. And I could babysit for you any time, if you wanted to go out. I’d be on hand, like. And what I thought was, if I give you the money right off, I only got to live another seven years, and you wouldn’t be hit with those old death-duties when I do pop off.’
‘Dad, it would be wonderful,’ Slider said, desperate to stop him, ‘but we could never afford a place big enough. We can’t find anything we can afford even for us.’
‘I’d be putting in my money, you know.’
‘I know, but what you could get for the cottage just wouldn’t be enough in London.’
Mr Slider chuckled. ‘Oh, I got a fair bit for it. A tidy bit. I sold it to a developer, you see.’
‘A developer?’
‘That’s right, son. It seems the government’s told the County Council they’ve got to build six thousand more houses in Essex, and the only way they can do that is on greenfield sites. Well, my bit of land’s handy to the main road, and there’s the lane all the way up to the cottage, with the sewage and water and electric already laid on. And it’s not conservation land or prime farmland. So it’s ideal.’
Slider felt breathless. ‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ he managed to say.
‘I told you, I’m not so green as you think. Once they approached me and made an offer, I said I’d think about it, and I went and did a bit of homework. Talked to the planning officer at the council, had a look at some other plans, spoke to a solicitor. The developers offered me two hundred and fifty thousand for the cottage.’
‘Two hundred and fifty?’ Slider was pleasantly surprised. It was a lot for that little place, and it was all clear profit – no mortgage to pay off. Despite himself, his brain went instantly into calculation mode. A quarter of a million was far too little for anywhere round here, of course, but it was a handsome deposit in anyone’s language, and say he and Jo could get a hefty mortgage, and they looked further out – a
Mr Slider said, chuckling again, ‘Ah, but that’s just for the cottage. Near on four acres I got there. They could put sixteen executive homes on that, or twenty-four luxury dwellings. I took advice and asked ’em for one and a quarter million, and we settled in the end on one-point-oh-five. What that oh-five was about, don’t ask me! But it makes one-point-three altogether. That’ll be enough to get somewhere with a little annexe for me, won’t it? If you want me, that is.’
Slider found his voice at last. ‘For the chance of a live-in babysitter? Are you kidding?’
‘And don’t forget house-sitting,’ Mr Slider said calmly. ‘I read an article about it in the paper. If you have someone living in your house when you go on holiday, you can get a reduction on your insurance. Now that’s
Helplessly, and perhaps even with a touch of hysteria, Slider began to laugh.
