I agreed with him. He threw the details in the bin.
An hour later, I retrieved them.
We rang the estate agent. He said the house had been on the market for a year. The owner had moved to the country. It had been standing empty all that time.
‘If no one wants it,’ I pointed out to Jonathan, ‘maybe we can get the price down?’
He laughed.
‘I’m just going to look,’ I told him, ‘just on my own. Just in case.’
‘In case of what?’
‘Just to put my mind at rest, OK?’
Number 34 Lillieshall Road. Even the street name sounded like flowers. Lilies and shawls. Armfuls of scented lilies and, yes, baby shawls. We’d been to Mothercare and bought several satisfying cellophaned packs of white cellular baby blankets. Just to have in the cupboard. They looked impossibly small. They looked like they were made for a doll’s cot. I couldn’t believe we’d ever use them.
Lilies and shawls. Flowers and babies.
It was a hot afternoon in May. The young man from the estate agents – sweating in his shirt and suit – unlocked the door and said he’d leave me to wander round on my own. A fatal thing to let me do. Like leaving a pair of Victorian lovers unchaperoned. Maybe he knew it. Maybe he knew how hard my heart was pumping. Don’t ever go house-hunting when you’re pregnant. As bad as doing the weekly food shop just before lunch. Too hungry, you’ll buy too much.
I was hungry.
I fell in love immediately, as expectant, first-time mothers do with houses that are beautiful, empty (unloved!) and streaming with sudden late afternoon sunshine after rain. I paced those rooms, the dusty air lit with magic, and knew that it was mine already. It was waiting for me to fill it with children. I could have had my babies right there and then, on the wide, dusty floor of the bedroom.
In fact, I could already hear the furious laughter of toddlers echoing round the terracotta-tiled kitchen. I could see the small Wellington boots lined up in the hall, the school blazers hanging – torn and stained – from the pegs by the stairs. I could even, if I strained hard enough, hear the dull thud of teenage music from an upper room, the slam of an adolescent bedroom door. The house wasn’t empty at all. It was full of my life, my future.
‘Like it?’ asked the young man who stubbed out a cigarette as I reemerged into the sitting room.
‘It’s just perfect!’ I said. Then I worried. Was I supposed to sound cooler?
But how could I? It was quite simply the most perfect house I’d ever walked into.
The rooms were large, light, the walls rag-rolled. Apricot and gold in the sitting room, lavender and hyacinth in the first-floor bedroom. In fact it was a house full of decorative surprises. The loo on the first-floor landing was papered in black and white striped felt, exactly like a zebra, with a silken tassel (a tail!) to flush the loo itself. The top (second-floor) bedroom was described in the details as having ‘wallpaper with matching hand-painted blinds’. What it neglected to add was that the wallpaper was Tottenham Hotspur wallpaper – blue and white shields repeated so many times that it sent you dizzy – and the blinds had ‘The Spurs! The Spurs!’ hand-stencilled on them.
‘I know,’ said the estate agent with an apologetic laugh. ‘We weren’t sure whether or not to come clean about that. I mean, it could be offputting – unless you’re a fan?’
‘My husband’s a cricket man,’ I told him, ‘but we’ve got a baby on the way.’
‘Oh, well then. You never know.’
He left me alone again and I went and stood in the garden, which was eighty feet long and clearly cherished. The magnolia had just finished flowering – huge waxy teardrop petals flushed with pink and still damp from the recent shower. Grass springy and damp underfoot – scent of lilac, honeysuckle, and the strange deliciousness of parched soil after rain. A blackbird called down the lawn.
I had to live here. The baby in me wouldn’t be born till the following January, but I’d recently felt it move for the first time – a fluttery zigzag I could just feel if I lay on my stomach and shut my eyes. Now I knew for certain that this child would live here in this house. It would be his or her house – the place where he or she cried and laughed and took his or her first steps. I went back and told Jonathan.
He put his head in his hands and then he said what he always says in these situations: ‘We’ll just have to find the money somehow then.’
We only met John Pidgeon once, at the house, to talk through fixtures and fittings. He was living out in Kent and should, we reckoned, have been relieved – grateful even – finally to be done with his bridging loan. But if he was, he didn’t show us. He played it so very cool. Years later, all I remembered about him was that he had brown hair and a beard, was a little older than us, and was in rock music journalism. Also – as he told us then – that his wife was an interior designer. This explained the rag-rolling.
We stood with him on the lawn and talked about the big white marble fireplaces in the sitting room. They’d been stolen while the house was standing empty but Val across the road had seen the burglars in action and they’d been caught red-handed. So the fireplaces had been returned and reinstalled, but badly. You could see all the joins between the marble slabs and the mantel of the one at the front wasn’t quite straight.
John Pidgeon agreed to sell us the huge mirror that was screwed to the bathroom wall (I really wanted the house exactly as I’d seen it that first afternoon) and then he announced that he wanted to dig up some plants. The yellow rose, for instance – it had been planted for a child who died. And the magnolia, too, was of sentimental value.
‘He can’t take the magnolia!’ I told Jonathan, horrified.
I’d dreamed about that magnolia several times by now – vague, happily disorganized dreams in which our nameless, faceless baby also featured. The magnolia, with its generous green arms lifted to the sky, was already a part of my life. Trees are owned by places, not by people. They belong to the ground. That magnolia wasn’t going anywhere.
I did feel for him about the dead child, but a meaner part of me wondered whether he was actually telling the truth. But then could a person make that kind of thing up? The fact that this thought crossed my mind shows that I might have been going to be a mother, but I really knew nothing yet of the ferocity of birth and death, of everything that parenthood makes you stand to lose. If I had, would I have begged him to take the rose away? ‘Have it – please, I understand.’ I’d like to think so.
All of this is on my mind as I write to John Pidgeon at the forwarding address he left with us in 1988. The letter comes back a week later, scuffed and creased and marked ‘Not known at this address’.
Meanwhile, I go to the Minet Archives Library in Knatchbull Road – the same library where I first glimpsed Henry and Charlotte on the juddering microfiche – and ask the librarian whether there’s any way of finding out the names of people who lived in our house. She has thick black hair and a frowny face and is drinking coffee from a mug with a picture of the Teletubbies on it.
‘I suppose you could look in Kelly’s,’ she says.
Kelly’s?
She leads me over to a shelf of volumes and tells me I can just look up our address, year by year, and the names should all be there. It’s a kind of phone book from before there were phones; the first half is more like the Yellow Pages, listing shops and tradesmen, and then there’s a long list of ‘householders’, street by street, house by house. It’s that easy.
‘It’ll only be the adults,’ she says, ‘but it should give you a list of names, if that’s what you’re