‘Good morning,’ said the roundabout lady at the desk on the left-hand side. ‘Can I help you?’ she pleaded brightly.
Mr Whipplestone pulled out the most non-committal stop in his FO organ and tempered its chill with a touch of whimsy.
‘You may satisfy my idle curiosity if you will be so good,’ he said. ‘Ah – concerning No. 1, Capricorn Walk.’
‘No. 1, the Walk?’ repeated the lady. ‘Yes. Our notice, ackshally, has only just gone up. For Sale with stipulations regarding the basement. I’m not quite sure –’ she looked across at the young man with a pre-Raphaelite hair-do behind the right-hand desk. He was contemplating his fingernails and listening to his telephone. ‘What is it about the basement, of No. 1,’ he rattled into it, ‘is at present occupied as a pied –’
He clapped a languid hand over the receiver: ‘Ay’m coping,’ he said and unstopped the receiver. ‘The basement of No. 1,’ he rattled into it, ‘is at present occupied as a pied-à-terre by the owner. He wishes to retain occupancy. The Suggested Arrangement is that total ownership pass to the purchaser and that he, the vendor, become the tenant of the basement at an agreed rent for a specified period.’ He listened for a considerable interval. ‘No,’ he said, ‘ay’m afraid it’s a firm stipulation. Quate. Quate. Theng you, madam. Good morning.’
‘That,’ said the lady, offering it to Mr Whipplestone, ‘is the situation.’
Mr Whipplestone, conscious of a lightness in his head, said: ‘And the price?’ He used the voice in which he had been wont to say: ‘This should have been dealt with at a lower level.’
‘Was it thirty-nine?’ the lady asked her colleague. ‘Thirty-eight.’
‘Thirty-eight thousand,’ she relayed to Mr Whipplestone, who caught back his breath in a civilized little hiss.
‘Indeed?’ he said. ‘You amaze me,’
‘It’s a Desirable District,’ she replied indifferently. ‘Properties are at a premium in the Capricorns.’ She picked up a document and glanced at it. Mr Whipplestone was nettled.
‘And the rooms?’ he asked sharply. ‘How many? Excluding, for the moment, the basement.’
The lady and the pre-Raphaelite young gentleman became more attentive. They began to speak in unison and begged each other’s pardon.
‘Six,’ gabbled the lady, ‘in all. Excluding kitchen and Usual Offices. Floor-to-floor carpets and drapes included in purchase price. And the Usual Fitments: fridge, range, etcetera. Large recep’ with adjacent dining-room, ground floor. Master bedroom and bathroom with toilet, first floor. Two rooms with shower and toilet, second floor. Late tenant used these as flat for married couple.’
‘Oh?’ said Mr Whipplestone, concealing the emotional disturbance that seemed to be lodged under his diaphragm. ‘A married couple? You mean?’
‘Did for him,’ said the lady.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Serviced him. Cook and houseman. There was an Arrangement by which they also cleaned the basement flat.’
The young man threw in: ‘Which it is hoped will continue. They are Strongly Recommended to purchaser with Arrangement to be arrived at for continued weekly servicing of basement. No obligation, of course.’
‘Of course not.’ Mr Whipplestone gave a small dry cough. ‘I should like to see it,’ he said.
‘Certainly,’ said the lady crisply. ‘When would you –?’
‘Now, if you please.
‘I think that would suit. If you’ll just wait while I –’ She used her telephone. Mr Whipplestone bumped into a sudden qualm of near-panic. ‘I am beside myself,’ he thought. ‘It’s that wretched cat.’ He pulled himself together. After all he was committed to nothing. An impulse, a mere whim induced, he dared say, by unaccustomed idleness. What of it?’
The lady was looking at him. Perhaps she had spoken to him.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr Whipplestone.
She decided he was hard-of-hearing. ‘The house,’ she articulated pedantically, ‘is open to view. The late tenants have vacated the premises. The married couple leave at the end of the week. The owner is at home in the basement flat. Mr Sheridan,’ she shouted. ‘That’s the vendor’s name: Sheridan.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Mervyn!’ cried the lady, summoning up a wan and uncertain youth from the back office. ‘No. 1, the Walk. Gentleman to view.’ She produced keys and smiled definitively upon Mr Whipplestone. ‘It’s a Quality Residence,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’ll think so.’
The youth attended him with a defeated air round the corner to No. 1, Capricorn Walk.
‘Thirty-eight thousand pounds!’ Mr Whipplestone inwardly expostulated. ‘Good God, it’s outrageous!’
The Walk had turned further into the sun, which now sparkled on No. l’s brass door-knocker and letter-box, Mr Whipplestone, waiting on the recently scrubbed steps, looked down into the area. It had been really very ingeniously converted, he was obliged to concede, into a ridiculous little garden with everything on a modest scale.
‘Pseudo-Japanese,’ he thought in a panic-stricken attempt to discredit it.
‘Who looks after that?’ he tossed at the youth. ‘The basement?’
‘Yar,’ said the youth.
(‘He hadn’t the faintest idea,’ thought Mr Whipplestone.)
The youth had opened the front door and now stood back for Mr Whipplestone to enter.
The little hall and stairway were carpeted in cherry red, the glossy walls were an agreeable oyster-white. This scheme was continued in a quite sizeable drawing-room. The two bow windows curtained in red and white stripes were large and the whole interior remarkably light for a London room. For some twenty years he had vaguely regretted the murkiness of his service flat.
Without warning he was overtaken by an experience that a less sophisticated man might have been tempted to call hallucinatory. He saw, with the utmost clarity, his own possessions occupying this light-hearted room. The Chippendale wall-desk, the crimson sofa with its companion table, the big red glass goblet, the Agatha Troy landscape, the late Georgian bookcase: all were harmoniously accommodated. When the youth opened double-doors into a small dining-room, Mr Whipplestone saw at a glance that his chairs were of precisely the right size and character.
He dismissed these visions. ‘The partition folds back,’ he said with a brave show of indifference, ‘to form one room, I suppose?’
‘Yar,’ said the youth and folded it back. He opened red and white striped curtains in the rear wall and revealed a courtyard and tub-garden.
‘Lose the sun,’ Mr Whipplestone sneered, keeping his head, ‘Get none in the winter.’
It was, however, receiving its full quota now.
‘Damp,’ persisted Mr Whipplestone defiantly. ‘Extra expense. Have to be kept up.’ And he thought: ‘I’d do better to hold my tongue.’
The kitchen was on the left of the dining-room. It was a modernized affair with a service hatch. ‘Cramped!’ Mr Whipplestone thought of saying but his heart was not in it.
The stairs were steep which ought to have been a comfort. Awkward for trays and luggage and suppose one died how would they get one out of it? He said nothing.
The view from the master-bedroom through the french windows embraced in its middle distance the Square with the Sun in Splendour on the left and – more distantly on the right – the dome of the Basilica. In the foreground was the Walk with foreshortened