Our House by Louise Candlish (3)

3

‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:03:10

Ruinous though the situation is, catastrophic even, it is also quite fitting that it’s ended the way it has, because it has always been about the house. Our marriage, our family, our life: they only seemed to make proper sense at home. Take us out of it – even on one of the smart holidays we used to treat ourselves to when the kids were very young and we very sleep-deprived – and the glue would ooze away. The house sheltered us and protected us, but it also defined us. It kept us current long after our expiry date.

Plus, let’s be frank, this is London, and in recent years the house had earned more in capital growth than either Bram or I made from our salaries. It was the family’s primary breadwinner, our benign master. Friends and neighbours felt the same, as if our human power had been taken from us and invested in bricks and mortar. Spare cash was sunk not in pension funds or private education or marriage-salvaging weekends in Paris, but in the house. You know you’ll get it back, we told each other. It’s a no-brainer.

That reminds me of something I’d forgotten till now. That day, that terrible day when I came home and discovered the Vaughans in my house, Merle asked them outright what I hadn’t yet thought to ask: How much did you pay for it?

And even though my marriage, my family, my life had been annihilated, I still paused my sobbing to listen to the answer:

‘Two million,’ Lucy Vaughan said, in a broken whisper.

And I thought, It was worth more.

We were worth more.

*

We bought it for a quarter of that – still a substantial enough sum at the time to have caused us sleepless nights. But once I’d set eyes on 91 Trinity Avenue, I couldn’t consider being an insomniac anywhere else. It was the bourgeois confidence of its red-brick exterior, with its pale stone details and chalky white paintwork, wisteria curling onto the wrought-iron Juliet balcony above the door. Impressive but approachable, solid but romantic. Not to mention neighbours with the same sensibilities as ours. One after another, we’d rooted out this delightful spot, sacrificed a tube stop for that languidness you get in the suburbs, that sweetness, the air dusted with sugar like Turkish delight.

Inside was a different story. When I think now of all the improvements we made over the years, the energy the house absorbed (the cash!), I can’t believe we took it on in the first place. There were, in no particular order: the remodelled kitchen, the refreshed bathrooms, the reimagined gardens (rear and front), the refurbished downstairs cloakroom, the repaired sash windows, the restored timber flooring. Then, when the ‘re-’ verbs had run out, there was a slew of new: new French doors from kitchen to garden, new kitchen cupboards and worktop, new fitted wardrobes in the boys’ bedrooms, new glazed partition in the dining area, new railings and gate for the front, new playhouse and slide out back . . . On it went, a constant programme of renewal, Bram and I (well, mostly I) like the directors of a charitable body carving up its annual budget, all free time spent canvassing for price quotes, booking and supervising labour, searching on- and offline for fittings and fixtures and the implements needed to fit and fix them, curating colours and textures. And the tragic fact is never, ever did I stand back and say ‘It’s done!’ The idea of the perfect house eluded me like a rake in an old romance novel.

Of course, if I had my time again I probably wouldn’t touch a thing. I’d concentrate on the humans. I’d re-purpose them before they destroyed themselves.

*

The previous owners were an older couple, just the kind I imagined we would become. Moderately successful in their teaching careers (they’d bought the place when you didn’t need corporate careers like ours or, later, banking ones like the Vaughans’, to afford a decent family home) and confident of the job they’d done raising their kids, they’d wanted to release equity, release themselves. They planned to travel and I imagined them as born-again nomads making a desert crossing under the stars.

‘It must be very hard to say goodbye to a house like that,’ I said to Bram as we drove back to our flat after a visit to measure up for curtains that had ended with a bottle or two of wine. He would have been breaking the speed limit, possibly the drink-driving one too, but it didn’t bother me then, before the boys, when there were only our own lives at risk. ‘I thought there was something a bit melancholy about them,’ I added.

‘Melancholy? They’re crying all the way to the bank,’ Bram said.

Bram, Word document

So how did I get to this point? The point of terminal despair? Believe me, it would have been better for all concerned if I’d reached it a lot sooner. Even the short version is a long story (okay, so this is a bit more than a ‘note’ – it’s a full-scale confession).

Before I start, let me ask this: Was it actually the house itself that was doomed? Did she simply take down all who sailed in her?

The old couple we bought it from were splitting up, you see. The estate agent let that slip when he and I nipped into the Two Brewers for a drink on the way back from a visit with our builder. (‘Fancy trying out your new local?’ he asked, and I don’t suppose I needed any second invitation.)

‘Not the sort of information you share with prospective buyers,’ he admitted. ‘No one likes to think they’re moving into a house that’s witnessed marital breakdown.’

‘Hmm.’ I gripped the glass, raised it to my lips, as I would at that bar thousands of times to come. The pale ale was more than acceptable and the place had an old-school feel to it, hadn’t yet gone the gastro route of most of the boozers in the area.

‘You’d be surprised how common divorce is with these empty nesters,’ he went on. ‘Pack the youngest off to university and then suddenly you and the wife have time to notice you hate each other and have done for years.’

‘Really?’ I was surprised. ‘I thought it was only our parents’ generation who stuck it out for the sake of the children.’

‘Not the case. Not in areas like this, people like this. It’s more traditional than you’d think.’

‘Well, it’s only divorce, I suppose. Could be worse. Could be body parts found in the drains.’

‘I definitely wouldn’t have told you that,’ he said, laughing.

I didn’t say anything about it to Fi. She had some romantic notion of this past-it pair collecting their final-salary pensions and riding camels across the desert like Lawrence of Arabia. Flying hot air balloons over Vesuvius, that kind of crap. Like they hadn’t already had forty years of teachers’ holidays to travel the world.

We’d seen at least a couple of dozen houses by then and the last thing I needed was her changing her mind about the first one to pass muster on the grounds that ‘melancholy’ was some kind of airborne disease. Like smallpox or TB.

‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:07:40

Was I aware of the house’s escalating value? Of course I was. We were all on Rightmove constantly. But I never would have sold it. The opposite: I had hopes of keeping it in the Lawson family, of finding some tax-efficient way for the boys to raise their kids there, my grandchildren’s heads resting on the same pillows, under the same windows, as my sons’ did then.

‘How will that work?’ my friend Merle asked. She lives a couple of doors down from my place (my old place, it’s still hard to say it). ‘I mean, what’re the chances their wives will want to share a house with each other?’

It went without saying that the women of the future would be making the decisions. Trinity Avenue, Alder Rise, was a matriarchy.

‘I haven’t thought about the official negotiations,’ I said. ‘Can’t you just allow me my little castle in the air?’

‘That’s all it is, I’m afraid, Fi.’ Merle pulled that small secret smile of hers that made you feel so chosen, as if she bestowed it only on the very special. Of the women in my circle she was the least concerned with her appearance – petite and nimble-bodied, dark-eyed, occasionally dishevelled – and that made her, inevitably, one of the most attractive. ‘You know as well as I do that we’ll all have to sell up sooner or later to fund our nursing homes. Our dementia care.’

Half the women on the street thought they had dementia, but they were really just overloaded or, at most, suffering generalized anxiety. That was what had caused Merle, Alison, Kirsty and me to gravitate towards one another: we didn’t ‘do’ neurosis. We kept calm and carried on (we hated that phrase).

When I hear myself now, it’s laughable: didn’t ‘do’ neurosis? What about the kind caused by marital breakdown, betrayal, fraud? Who did I think I was?

You’ve probably already decided that. I know everyone will be judging me – believe me, I’m judging myself. But what’s the point of me doing this if I’m not going to present myself honestly, warts and all?

*

What do I do for a living? I work four days a week as an account manager for a large homewares retailer – recently I’ve been involved in our new line of ethically sourced rugs, as well as some beautiful pieces by Italian glassmakers inspired by spirals.

It’s a great company, with a really holistic and forward-thinking ethos: can you believe they suggested my reduced hours to fit better with my parenting? And this is retail? They’d signed up for an EU initiative to support working mothers and I was in the right place at the right time. Well, you know what they say when that happens: never leave.

It’s true, I could probably earn more working for one of the big cut-throat conglomerates, but I’ve always valued work–life balance over salary. Some of us don’t want our throats cut, do we? It’s a cliché, I know, but I love working with the kind of handmade products that really make a house a home.

Yes, even now I no longer have one of my own.

Bram, Word document

I worked for the best part of ten years for a Croydon-based orthopaedic supplies manufacturer as one of their regional sales managers for the South East. I was on the road a lot, especially in the early years. I sold all kinds of braces – for knees, elbows, you name it – and neck pillows and abdominal binders, but really they could have been anything. Paperclips, dogfood, solar panels, tyres.

It was meaningless then and it’s meaningless now.