Charlie and Edith moved into their new house on the same day that Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth. Edith had been tracking the Russian’s journey into outer space on the radio and in the newspapers, enthralled. Most days she could barely muster the courage to leave her own home.
‘How brave is this man, that he is prepared to leave the planet?’ she marvelled. Who knew what would happen up there? The poor fellow might suffocate, or explode, or be crushed by hitherto undiscovered cosmic forces. Edith hoped he had lived a rich and full life up till now. She wondered whether he had a wife and children, and how much he would be missed.
Normally Edith would have spent an hour or two at the library researching Yuri’s personal circumstances, but the previous month had been almost entirely occupied by the daunting business of curtains, carpets and colour swatches for the new house. She was delighted to be vacating their old liver-brick place near the city. Edith had never trusted it: she imagined the house as a glowering widow, squatting malevolently on its sandstone foundations, jealous of everybody else’s happiness, especially hers. She knew, of course, that houses were inanimate objects, unable to plot against their occupants, but she was convinced that if the dark bungalow could conspire against her it would.
It was a great relief, therefore, to be moving to a lovely new timber home surrounded by other new timber homes in a brand new suburban subdivision, a venture she had intentionally planned to coincide with the auspicious occasion that one man, on behalf of all mankind, rocketed into space. She and Yuri were launching into new frontiers. Edith knew it was a stretch to compare her enterprise to the cosmonaut’s. She would certainly never tell anyone else she was doing so, not even Charlie. But that was not the point…
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