I leave it a couple of days and then I decide Enough is Enough. I am going to phone the Bank of Scotland to chase the deeds. My faxes have all gone unanswered.
The man starts to ask me for my name and mortgage account number and I interrupt politely to explain that it’s not an enquiry about the mortgage.
‘What then?’ he asks me in a slightly ruder voice. I explain that I’m a writer, actually; that mine is an unusual request; that I just want to look at the deeds of my house for research purposes. I faxed them four days ago and I’ve heard nothing. Can’t I just be put through to the department. Please?
‘No one,’ he says very frostily, ‘can actually speak to the deeds department.’
‘But why?’
‘They don’t deal directly with people.’
‘But – why?’
‘It’s just the way they work.’
‘So they’re only reachable by fax?’
‘That’s right.’
I sigh. ‘But what if they don’t ever fax back?’
‘I’m sorry, madam, that’s not for me to say.’
‘But you work for the Bank of Scotland!’
‘I’m not in the deeds department.’
I try to work this one out. ‘But – so there’s no way of chasing them other than by sending another fax?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
I try another tack. ‘Do you think it’s likely they got it?’
‘I really couldn’t say. If you sent it through then I dare say they have it.’
‘So – how long do you think I should wait to hear?’
He takes a breath. ‘They won’t have prioritized it, madam,’ he says at last.
Eventually and grudgingly he gives me the name of the deeds manager. I say I’ll send yet another fax to him, a personal one.
‘That might be an idea,’ he says.
I put down the phone. A tabby cat lands with a thump on the desk, walks her muddy rainpaws all over my Post-it notes.
I’m driving to Kent to see John and Julia Pidgeon. I’m nervous. Ridiculously so. It’s just the idea of seeing John again, of meeting the mysterious Julia – of asking them a whole lot of personal questions about their lives in this house that I’d never dreamed I’d have to ask.
How will they react? Won’t they mind? Is it any of my business anyway? All I can think of is the beautiful garden we didn’t maintain, the fireplaces we eventually ripped out, and the sentimental rose I didn’t let him take.
‘Bear in mind it’s far worse for them,’ Jonathan tells me before I leave. ‘The one thing you can usually rely on when you sell your house is that you’ll never have to see the person who bought it ever again.’
He’s right, of course. You stand on a lawn somewhere between exchange and completion and have a brief altercation about a bathroom mirror (I think we handed over £50 cash), a magnolia tree, a rose bush – but at least you think there’s nothing to lose. You’ll never see each other ever again. And when the new owner discovers that painted-over damp or the collapsing ceiling, you’ll be long gone.
John had said ‘deepest Kent’, and that’s just what this is: soft, sweet, English butter-wrapper countryside, rolling fields, sudden canopies of trees that turn the light an underwater green as the car dips beneath. Even though John sent me meticulous directions, I still manage to drive right past the house and all the way up to the end of the lane where it peters out into a rough track. And then nothing, no space to move forward. I have to back out and turn around in a clearing, branches and brambles scratching against the roof of the car. I rumble all the way back down the track and eventually find the house, a long low cottage set back from the road. Quiet and tranquil and utterly rural. As different as it could be from Lillieshall Road.
As I crunch across the gravel, a nervy, noticeably beautiful woman with reddish hair and a plum-coloured shirt comes striding out. Julia is slim, wide-mouthed, bright-eyed – younger than I’d expected. She holds out a hand. I tell her it’s so good finally to meet the person whose walls and curtains we lived with for so many years.
She laughs quickly. ‘Ha! The sponging, yes!’
And we always thought it was rag-rolling.
She calls to John, who’s doing something in the hedge. He steps down the bank, some kind of pruner in his hand and holds out the other one. He is just exactly as I remember him – solid, gruff, bearded, and slightly on edge. But then so am I.
We go in the kitchen – a little farmhousey kitchen whose long low window is filled up with a view of smooth country lawn. Julia makes coffee and John clears stuff off the table, spreads a load of photos out, and straightaway starts to tell me how he was in the process of buying the house – in 1980 – when he met Julia.
‘My wife and I lived at No. 61, but we’d decided the marriage wasn’t going anywhere. And she went to stay in her parents’ place in Kensington – a mews, I think they still have it. Anyway I think the sign went up at No. 34 on the Saturday morning – and I went straight round to the estate agent and the house was hideous, dreadful decor and all that, but I remember still thinking it was under-priced. I bought it immediately. For – guess how much?’
I shake my head and bite my lip. I can’t guess.
‘£32,000.’
He smiles and straightaway so does Julia. They both know we paid £217,500 for it just eight years later.
Julia pours coffee, pushes the sugar and milk across the table.
I ask him if he can remember who the seller was, but he can’t. He vaguely thinks that when he was first shown round the house there was a large black woman living there.
‘Was she called Kyle maybe? Or Ricketts?’
‘I don’t know. The name Ricketts rings a bell, like I said in the e-mail.’
Suddenly Julia takes a bottle from the fridge, pours herself a glass of water, and stands and tips her head back and drinks it all in one. We both watch her.
‘It was hideous,’ John says again as if he realizes this spectacle has been distracting. ‘The house.’
‘But you could see its potential?’ Julia prompts.
John tells me exactly what it was like. ‘The front door was orange and hardboarded over with a rectangular panel of fluted glass –’
‘I thought it was bobbly?’ Julia says, pouring more water.
‘Or bobbly. Bobbly or fluted anyway – down the middle. All the internal doors were hardboarded over too and the banisters. I pulled the hardboard off and there were no – what do you call them? – actual banisters, the verticals.’
I’m surprised. ‘None?’
‘I had to put them in – the ones you have there aren’t the originals, far from it. I got them from a squat on Clapham Park Road. They were pulling this squat down – I knew some people there – and so I whipped out the banisters.’
I laugh. Because it’s surprising and funny, the idea that the banisters in our house – which we’ve painted and repainted reverently and have always assumed were original – actually came from a Brixton squat.
‘They were pulling it down anyway. So you didn’t actually do anything wrong,’ Julia interjects quickly.
John ignores this.