‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with h.’
‘Um, I don’t know. House?’
‘You’re not even trying.’
‘I am but there isn’t much else in my eyeline right now,’ Zoe said.
It was raining so hard she could barely see anything beyond the windscreen. Their little Fiat was packed so full of boxes and bags that she couldn’t see out of the back window either. The drive from Swiss Cottage to Highgate had been nerve-wracking enough and it hadn’t even been raining then.
They were stationary now; parked behind their removal van, Zoe’s mobile sitting on the dashboard. They both tried hard not to stare at it.
‘Do you give up?’ Win asked.
‘I absolutely give up.’
‘Hydrangeas.’
Zoe squinted furiously out of the window. ‘What hydrangeas?’
‘Somewhere out there.’ Win gestured at the murky foliage in front of the house. ‘You said they were hydrangeas, when we came for the first viewing, didn’t you?’
‘No!’ They’d only been playing I-Spy for two minutes and already Zoe was sick of it. ‘Are you talking about the rhododendron bushes, by any chance?’
‘Same thing, aren’t they?’
‘How did I end up married to a man who can’t tell the difference between a rhododendron and a hydrangea?’ Zoe shook her head sorrowfully.
‘You know the nature stuff is your department,’ Win said, because Zoe’s parents were firm believers in the benefits of fresh air and the Great Outdoors so being able to tell the difference between a rhododendron and a hydrangea wasn’t unduly taxing for her. She could even differentiate between a chaffinch and a goldcrest at fifty paces; a talent she rarely had use for. ‘While I can add up whole columns of numbers in my head. That’s what I bring to our relationship,’ Win reminded her. ‘Also, I bake. I keep you in cake.’
‘For which I’m eternally grateful,’ Zoe said and then her phone rang before Win could continue to list what else he brought to their union and they both twitched like they’d never heard a phone ring before.
It was Parminder, their solicitor. All the funds; money from the sale of their flat earlier that day, the savings squirrelled away, the mortgage they’d extended, had reached their final destination, never to return. Now Parminder had been instructed by the vendor’s solicitor that the key to the house that they’d just bought and could barely see from where they were sitting, was under a brick in the flowerbed nearest to the front door.
Zoe opened the car door. ‘We’d better make a run for it,’ she said.
They ran, coats pulled over their heads. There was nothing even near to being a flowerbed by the front door but they both rooted around in the tangle of weeds until Win found the key, then made a dash for the door.
It should have been a special moment. Their first proper house, a brand new start, but rain was dripping down Zoe’s neck and the movers were unloading so she took the key from Win and rammed it into the lock.
‘Not so fast.’ Win wrapped his arms around Zoe’s waist before she could jerk away and tried to lift her up. ‘I’m going to carry you over the threshold.’
They’d known each other for thirteen years. Lived together for ten of them. Been married for the last three and… ‘Win! Don’t be silly! Please let me down. You didn’t even carry me over the threshold on our wedding night.’
‘I was too drunk then, I’d have dropped you and anyway, this is our do-over, isn’t it?’ Win panted as he tried to find purchase on the slippery wet fabric of Zoe’s khaki parka. ‘Stop wriggling!’
Instead of sweeping Zoe up in his arms, it was more of a precarious fireman’s hold.
‘Please don’t drop me, I really don’t want to fracture anything.’
‘I’m not going to drop you. You’re as light as feather,’ Win grunted, which was a lie because Zoe was a good ten stone, most of it dough-based.
He staggered through the open doorway and Zoe had no choice but to cling tightly to him and wish he’d put her down…
‘Mind your backs!’ shouted a voice from behind them and Win did drop Zoe then so they could flatten their spines to the wall, as the first box was brought in. ‘Where do you want these then, guv?’
‘I’ve labelled every box,’ Win said. ‘Half the boxes are going in the front room, the other half upstairs in the back bedroom, next to the bathroom. All labelled. Clearly. Big black letters.’
‘Easy, tiger,’ Zoe murmured, but none of this was easy. She’d read somewhere that moving house was meant to be the third most stressful life event after death and divorce. She’d take moving house over death and divorce every time.
Another box was carried in and once again they were asked where they wanted it. From the clenched set of his jaw, Zoe could tell that Win was bearing down on his back teeth and who knew where his mouthguard was – hopefully in one of the boxes marked ‘BATHROOM’.
‘Stop grinding. You’ll end up with lockjaw again.’ Zoe plucked at the damp sleeve of Win’s anorak. ‘Remember, we agreed that we were going to treat this as an adventure. This is a beautiful house and we’re lucky we get to live here.’
‘It’s not beautiful right now.’ Win caught Zoe glaring at him and realised he was off-message. ‘But it will be by the time we’re done.’
They’d never meant to buy a house. They had a plan in place, which involved selling their one-bedroom flat in Swiss Cottage so they could afford a two-bedroom flat at the northernmost tip of one of the Tube lines, the Victoria or Piccadilly, which was as far out as Win was prepared to go, being a born and bred north Londoner.
Then Zoe had seen the ad in the property pages of the Hampstead and Highgate Express. A four-bedroom house in Highgate, in need of a complete overhaul and modernisation, and apparently priced to reflect that, though Win said he doubted that very much.
Some people would have read the forbidding words ‘in need of complete renovation’ and taken fright but Zoe had become quite giddy at the possibility of all those period details left intact. So, the house was a fixer-upper? Well, who didn’t need a little fixing-up from time to time?
As requested, she’d written to the address on the advert and subsequently they’d been invited for an interview with a fusty old solicitor at a fusty old firm in Mayfair.
Once it had been established that Win and Zoe weren’t soulless property developers who wanted to carve the house up into flats and sell them on at a huge profit, they were told the below-market price of the property. It was a quarter of what a four-bedroom, semi-detached house in Highgate should have cost. It was even less than the price of a two-bedroom flat in Cockfosters, right at the end of the Piccadilly Line.
It was far too good to be true. There had to be a catch. And there was.
The house had been built and purchased in 1936 then never lived in, which was very odd but not odd enough to cool Zoe’s ardour. On the contrary, now that Zoe knew for sure that there’d be original period features still intact, nothing Win had to say about dry rot or subsidence was anything that she wanted to hear. She’d made arrangements to view the property on a sunny late-September day.
The house was just across the road from Highgate Tube station on a street off Southwood Lane, which led up to Highgate Village and beyond that the vast green acres of Hampstead Heath.
Although Elysian Place ran parallel to a major arterial road into central London, all Zoe and Win could hear were birds singing as they wandered down the tree-lined street full of solidly built, semi-detached 1930s houses. There were a mix of styles – mock-Tudor, neo-Georgian – but twenty-one and twenty-three had been built in the art deco-ish Moderne style. They were art deco-lite and right now, number twenty-three, their destination, was an art deco fright.
The house stood in an overgrown wilderness that once must have been laid out as a front garden with flowerbeds and a privet hedge. To the left of the plot was a drive, the concrete cracked, weeds valiantly pushing through towards the light. The graceful, minimalist curved lines of the house did give Zoe a little frisson but the white rendering was grey, streaked almost black in places. The original Crittall windows were warped in rotting wooden frames, in a couple of places the glass was cracked. The roof was no better; there were patches of moss clinging desperately to the slates that hadn’t gone MIA.
It still wasn’t enough to put them off. Hand in hand, they’d unlocked the front door, with its stained-glass sunburst panel, and stepped inside the hall, their path marked out by black and white tiles arranged in a simple geometric pattern. In 1936, it would have been the very latest thing in modern living. The beautiful sleek lines of the staircases and doorjambs, the tiled fire surrounds, the simple, understated architraves and ceiling roses.
Off the hall was a large living room, then a dining room, and at the end, a kitchen complete with walk-in pantry and off it, a small scullery. Up the stairs and behind pitch pine doors were a large master bedroom and a smaller boxroom at the front of the house, then a bathroom, a separate toilet and two good-sized back bedrooms.
Zoe had been worried that neither of them had experienced that special, tingly feeling you were meant to get when you were house hunting – that sense that you’d come home, that this was where you were meant to live. But as Win said, who cared about the feeling? This was a house for the kind of money that might have bought them a beautiful manor house with an orangery and a duck pond in the Scottish Highlands but in London, it wasn’t enough for a two-bedroom flat in Cockfosters.
Still, it was Win who went down with a serious case of cold feet first. ‘We might as well give up now,’ he’d told Zoe when they’d moved on to the next part of the application – writing a letter to the anonymous vendors explaining why they should get the house above any of the other applicants. Zoe thought it made the whole torturous house-buying process a lot more exciting and mysterious than Win filling in mortgage application forms and groaning, but Win had other concerns. ‘There’s not one good reason why they’d choose us over a family. A proper family. Two kids. Cat. Maybe a couple of hamsters. There’ll be other houses for us, although we’ll probably have to move miles out of London to afford one. I’m thinking maybe Blackburn.’
Zoe had twitched the solicitor’s letter out of Win’s hand. ‘We are a proper family,’ she’d said, folding the piece of paper and tucking it in the pocket of her jeans. ‘Two people can still be a family. Leave it to me.’
Leaving things to Zoe didn’t always work out so well, because she tended to forget about them, but three days later, she’d presented Win with the handmade book she’d put together. ‘Our House’ proclaimed the cover in a 1930s’ font. It opened on a beaming, #nofilter photo of Win and Zoe on their wedding day in the beer garden of their favourite pub. Win in a vintage Mod-style suit, Zoe in a white lace summer dress with forget-me-nots threaded through her blonde hair, the flowers the same shade of blue as Win’s eyes.
This is Win and Zoe, she’d written in a careful cursive script, who dream of living in a house with enough room for them to live and love and grow old.
Zoe earned a modest living as a writer and illustrator of children’s books so she had the skillset to show the unknown vendors just how she and Win would turn the house that time forgot into their home. She’d included sketches of what the rooms could look like, swatches of original thirties wallpaper, paint samples. Drawn pictures of long lazy summer days with the patio doors they’d install open onto a beautiful garden. Cosy winter nights with the fire in the living room blazing. She’d even drawn the birds and squirrels and hedgehogs that would flock to their garden to feast on the seeds and nuts that they’d leave out for them.
She might not have had ‘the feeling’ when they’d viewed the house, but when Zoe sent off their finished application, she’d known with absolute certainty that she and Win would be the chosen ones.
And three months later, on a rainy January afternoon, here they were. Walking through their house, rediscovering each room. The air that they displaced with their movements was frigid and cold. There was an odd smell too. Something dank and mildewy that seemed to settle on Zoe’s skin, but that was nothing that couldn’t be solved by a new roof, reconnection to the National Grid, central heating, damp-proofing and a few tins of Fired Earth paint.
‘It’s darker than I remembered,’ Win said as their footsteps echoed on the wooden boards. The house had never been carpeted or wallpapered; it was the barest bones of a house. ‘And I’d forgotten about that damp patch.’
They both looked up at the brown tidemarks stretching across the ceiling in the master bedroom at the front. ‘We know the roof is leaking,’ Zoe said. ‘That’s why we have scaffolders turning up first thing tomorrow so we can really endear ourselves to our new neighbours.’
Win stood in the centre of the room, which in a few months would be where they’d sleep, hold each other, make love again. For now it was a cold, musty space. Zoe watched her husband as he stared up at damage that decades of neglect had caused. Win was tall and lanky but there was a hunched quality to him these days. He looked tired and rumpled, had done for weeks and weeks.
‘This is our new beginning,’ Zoe said, because a house that had never been lived in didn’t have any memories. Nothing bad had ever happened here. It was a clean slate in a filthy, dilapidated kind of way.
Win turned to look at her. His thin, clever face was cast in shadow for a second and then he stepped forward and smiled. ‘You really want to rewind?’ he asked.
‘God, yes!’ Zoe nodded.
Win came forward, his smile as wide as his arms as if he wanted to seal their new resolution with a hug and a kiss. Zoe willed herself not to tense up as he pulled her into an embrace. In fact, she hugged Win back as hard as she could because, for once, it didn’t feel as if he were holding every muscle rigid.
How lovely to steal an unexpected moment, a memory of how good they used to be…
‘Jesus Christ! Gonna give myself a bloody hernia!’
The mood was ruined by the prolonged and fluent swearing from one of the movers as they tried to manoeuvre a large cumbersome box around the bend in the stairs.
Win and Zoe broke apart as quickly as they’d come together and stood, hands in pockets, not looking at each other.
‘Where do you want this one then, guv?’
Win turned, his expression eager as if he were grateful for the interruption even as he said, ‘God give me strength,’ under his breath.