Fairweather

Fairweather The funeral had been two weeks ago. Josiah and Martha had come to take away the dead flowers from her brother’s grave. Now, looking at the still-ungreened earth, Martha was crying again. Josiah took her cold hands in his own warm ones.
“I know. It’s hard.”
Behind him he could hear the sea, breaking against the shingle, shaping and smoothing the stones on the beach. Grief is like that, he thought. It shapes you. “Thank you,” Martha said, moving into the safe circle of his embrace. Nahum, her brother, had been nearly twenty years older than her: this hadn’t been a sudden shock.
“I’m all right really.” By common consent, they walked past the House on the Green: the house that had been Nahum’s home for the last ten years, until he’d gone into the hospice a month earlier.
“We’re going to have to decide what to do about this house,” Martha said. “It’s mine now.” “What do you want to do?” Joshua looked deep into his wife’s eyes, trying to read her feelings. “Do you want to sell it? Keep it?”
Martha thought hard. “I don’t want to part with it yet. I don’t want the hassle for one thing.” The late summer garden was beautiful, and the bees hummed contentedly among the flowers as if nothing had changed.
“But I don’t like the thought of it sitting empty either…” She sighed. “We could rent it out,” Josiah said tentatively. “Not as a holiday let, like the other house, but for a year. Or two. Give ourselves some breathing room…What do you think?”
Martha looked into her husband’s kind eyes and felt as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. “Yes. We could. That might work.” Back home, sitting close together, Josiah had another thought.
“You know what? We’ve got no bookings for The Salt Box after the end of November. We didn’t take any more last year because we didn’t know how much Nahum was going to need us, when he began to fail, remember? We could let that house on a long-term let as well. Through Ogilvy and Sterne – then we wouldn’t have any responsibilities at all. Say, from the first of December for both of them. Then we’d be free to do whatever we wanted – travel again like we did when we were young, or just relax here. How about that?” “That’s a lovely idea. We’ll let both places – maybe someone really nice will take them. And we’ll take some time for ourselves. Time to heal. This is a good place to live for that.”