Or, How the Ceiling Came Down Before the Walls Went Up
The plaster dust settled on the grand piano like the first snow of winter, which would have been charming if the piano hadn’t been in the dining room, and if the dining room hadn’t been missing its east wall. Sir Reginald Montague - Reggie to his friends, though none were present at the moment, likely due to the scaffolding obstructing the front door - stood amid the wreckage with the expression of a man who has just realized his umbrella is indoors and the rain is not.
The trouble had begun, as troubles often do, with the best of intentions. The house, a Georgian beauty with the structural integrity of a soufflé left out in a draft, had been in Reggie’s family for generations. Each heir, upon inheriting, made some small improvement - a conservatory here, a wine cellar there - until the place resembled less a stately home and more a architectural game of Jenga. Reggie, a man of vision (if not, alas, of foresight), had decided to “restore it to its original glory,” a phrase that had sounded splendid over brandy and proved catastrophic by breakfast.
The foreman, a Mr. Peabody, had arrived on the first day with the air of a man who had seen it all and regretted most of it. “We’ll start with the east wing,” he’d said, in the tone of a doctor suggesting a limb be removed before the infection spread. Reggie, mid-sentence in a draft letter to the Royal Society explaining the wing’s migration as a climate-adaptation strategy, had agreed. The east wing was now, technically, a wing in the ornithological sense - it had flown. A miscommunication involving a load-bearing wall and a celebratory demolition had left the dining room open to the elements, a fact the sparrows had noticed before Reggie did.
The architect, a young modernist with a passion for “fluid spaces,” had taken one look at the carnage and murmured something about “an exciting opportunity to reimagine the relationship between indoors and outdoors.” Reggie, who had always considered the relationship between indoors and outdoors to be one of polite mutual avoidance, found this unhelpful.
The real trouble - the second trouble, the one that made the first trouble seem like a minor hiccup in a pleasant afternoon - was Aunt Agatha. She had telephoned that morning to announce her impending visit, a word that in her vocabulary carried the same weight as “siege” might in a less refined lexicon. Reggie had not yet found a way to explain that her usual bedroom currently had more in common with a gazebo than a sleeping chamber.
Peabody, surveying the damage with the calm of a man who had long since accepted that the universe was fundamentally absurd, cleared his throat. “There’s a way out of this, sir,” he said, in the tone of a man who had once talked a vicar out of a bell tower.
Reggie brightened. “You’ve thought of something?”
Peabody adjusted his cap. “I’ve taken the liberty of moving the drawing room furniture into the garden. If we hang the curtains from the apple trees and tell your aunt it’s the new Italianate fashion, she might not notice the house is missing.”
Reggie considered this. Aunt Agatha’s opinions on continental decor were as firmly held as they were inexplicable. “It could work,” he said slowly.
“And the piano?”
“Leave it,” said Reggie, with the wisdom of a man who had finally grasped the first rule of home improvement: when in doubt, pretend it’s art. “Call it an installation. The critics will adore it.”
Outside, a sparrow alighted on the exposed dining table, pecked at a crumb of plaster, and flew off, unimpressed. Reggie popped the cork. The sparrow, returning for seconds, landed on the champagne flute and squawked once, in C-sharp.