by Joy Richards
“Spencer!” Florence called. “Spencer, no! Spencer, down!” She giggled. Spencer the dog was unstoppable. “I’m sorry,” she said to Paul with an easy charm. “Our dog has absolutely no manners.”
“That’s okay.” Paul scruffed the dog’s ears as he rubbed him hard on the top of his head. It really was. Paul loved dogs.
“Please, come in. Leave your shoes on. In this mess, you’ll need them.”
He was slightly alarmed, and relieved, to find the mess she was referring to was a maze of green and yellow building blocks strewn around the narrow hallway. A small blond child was sitting in the middle of the blocks, carefully chewing on one.
“Tim, say hello,” exhorted his mother. Tim flopped over and hid his face away in the crook of his elbow. Paul could see a cheeky smile peering through. Florence walked over and picked him up with surprising ease considering her skinny arms. “I’m sorry,” she continued, moving a lock of her beachy hair away from her son’s face, smiling tenderly. “We run a bit of a mad house. Come through,” she said, opening the door into the kitchen.
Paul loved the house. Not quite true. He liked the house, it had beautiful period features but it was a bit girly, with floral tiles in the fireplace, copper handles and light-blue cabinets in the kitchen. It was probably her place before her husband moved in, Paul reckoned. What he loved was the atmosphere.
Florence, smiling and soft spoken, giving him a tour of the little quirks of the house. Her rounded tummy, bumping into corners and furniture like a little person already. Young Tim, playing with an assortment of dinosaurs in a corner. His father, John, who shook his hand with a big grin before returning to arranging the toppings of a couple of pizzas. From the way they looked at each other, Paul could see they were truly happy. Their small blond angel, and another on the way. A gorgeous little house, which they were now trading for more space. The one bedroom and one box room would no longer work with two sets of little feet pitter-patting.
For the first time in his house search, Paul was smiling while walking away. It would need a little TLC: repaint the kitchen cabinets, change the tiles, maybe give the place an update with some interesting wallpaper, or a faux-brick wall. But for the first time since the semi-detached house with the apple trees, he could truly see himself living somewhere. It was small, a house for one or maybe two people, but it could accommodate more. It was filled with happiness: the toddler playing in the background, the parents gently going about their business. He could imagine them preparing dinner together, talking about their day, playing with their child. The husband resting his hand gently on his wife’s swollen belly, feeling his baby kick.
After the child had gone to bed they would sit on the love seat in the snug, him with a glass of wine, her with a lemonade, and talk about how excited they were about their new house. Maybe she was already making plans to do it up, make it look just right for them. Maybe she was showing him paint swatches and tile samples she’d collected during the day, and would run her hand through his hair with a quiet smile as he tried to tell the difference between shades of cream paint. They were so happy in their little pink house.
He was so euphoric about the place, and was truly heartbroken when Holly didn’t like it. She pointed out it was very small and many of its quirks could easily become annoying.
“What are you going to do with that tiny conservatory?” she asked after they’d had a second viewing, walking back to the station.
“It could be my home office.” Paul imagined himself editing away, surrounded by his garden.
“It’s got no insulation. You’ll freeze in the winter and roast in the summer. And the snug is far too small – there’s barely enough room for two!”
“I could knock it through to make the whole thing open space,” he replied, already envisaging it.
“I thought it was already at the top of your budget.” She was right. He was silent for a while.
“Look,” she said, as they got to the station. “I’m really sorry. You clearly love it, and it’s really none of my business.”
“No it’s fine!” he said quickly. It wasn’t fine.
“I just think you can do better, but a house is an emotional purchase. If you love it, if you get the feeling,” she said while making imaginary quotation marks in the air, “then that’s the right choice for you. You can always get rid of the conservatory and save up to make it all open-plan.”
She was right. It was a long-term purchase, he didn’t have to have everything right within a month. He could make it work. He got his phone out and called the agent. He wanted a third viewing. See the house, and the family, again. Then he let Holly buy him a beer at the funny-shaped pub next to the station, because she felt badly she’d been so blunt about his home. One beer turned into two, and about three bowls of those bright orange spicy prawn crackers they sold in fancy pubs. On the way back, on the long train ride, she fell asleep resting her head on his shoulder.
He returned for a third viewing during his lunch break. He’d taken the afternoon off for the viewing and to go on a second date he was not at all excited about with a doctor who was on nights and had the daytime free. He was not really interested in more medical romance, and he did not particularly fancy the woman, but she’d asked him and he was too awkward to say no. In between now and getting married, he had to get around to telling her she was really nice but he just wasn’t interested.
The house looked even better than it had on the first and second viewing. By all objective standards, it looked worse. Many of the toys that had been neatly stacked away in brightly coloured plastic bins in the lounge were spread around the floor and the stairs, scattered by the child and the dog in equal measure. The woman, whose name he’d already forgotten, was clearly wearing a flowered pyjama shirt over her maternity jeans. She looked slightly more frazzled, lost without her husband there. After she’d shown Paul around, she offered him a cup of tea and he said yes. She looked slightly shocked – how are you meant to tell which tea offers are genuine and which are pro-forma? However, once she’d poured him a very milky cup in a blue-and-white polka dot mug she looked relieved to be sitting with him at the dining table.
“Are you going to make an offer?” she asked him shyly.
Wow, lady, he thought. Way to throw the book of convention to the wind. “Yes.” Probably a bad idea, but he felt that conversation somehow did not count.
Her eyes filled with tears. “Thank you,” she whispered. “We really really need to move.”
He looked around and saw the place through her eyes. It was too small already, and it was probably getting worse by the day as more toys propped up. The new baby must be coming soon: while he was admittedly no expert, Paul thought she was close enough to giving birth. She had to be, she was huge.
He went home and slept on it. In the morning, he called the agent. He put in an offer, at asking price. It left him with about two thousand pounds to buy himself some furniture, move and paint the place but he didn’t care. Two hours later, the agent called him at work. John and Florence – that’s what her name was! – had been very pleased to accept his offer. The agent would be in touch soon with some paperwork.
Paul hung up the phone and carefully got up from his desk, trying to not look too excited. While he was positive he would soon issue a group text demanding a midweek pub night to celebrate his victory, he wanted to enjoy the moment for himself. He carefully stepped through the office and made it to the stairs. After the door closed behind him, he let himself go in a bizarre jump-and-fist-pump combo. It was graceless: the salsa lessons had failed to teach him to make his body move coherently. He slowly walked downstairs and stepped onto the street. He walked over to the corner coffee place and got himself a hot chocolate. He drank it quietly, walking back to the office through the leafy streets of North London. He should text everyone, let them know before they packed up their things and left the office for the day. Or maybe he could tell them all tomorrow, go to the pub then. Have today for himself.
He walked past Holly’s cubicle, then stopped. She was listening to loud music through huge headphones, and he had to tap her on her shoulder. She turned round. He did not know what he was going to say before he said it.
“I got the house,” he whispered, silently fist-pumping the air once more.
“That’s amazing!” she whispered back, her voice comically low, and she spun around in her chair offering a high-five. Their hands clapped, silently.
“Do you want to go for a drink and celebrate?” What was he doing?
“Sounds excellent,” she said, normal volume resumed. “Have you texted the others?”
Oh, right. The others. “Not yet,” he replied quickly. “Gonna do it right now.” And he whipped out his phone.
“I’m really happy for you,” she said while he texted. “You deserve this, you know?”
“Ha-ha. Yes, of course I do. Commentary on the privileged middle class, I see.”
“No, I’m serious. You’ve been through enough shit, you deserve a nice house. Even though it’s pink and has Barbie’s closet at the back.” She smirked.
He felt bizarrely wounded, which was unreasonable. After all, she was saying a nice thing with a little joke attached, and not even that mean.
“All right.” He turned round. “I’ll see you at six.”
6
John
They had a buyer. Thank you, Jesus. They might even get to move before the baby came. There was literally nothing he would like more than to take Tim and Florence by the hand and walk out of their perversely tiny house. They would stand on the pavement, throw a match on the floor and set the whole terrace row ablaze. Poof, just like that, gone. Start fresh. Buy all new things. New clothes for them, new toys for Tim, new furniture that wasn’t a hundred years old and creaky. Do it right this time.
In this fantasy, Florence would be enthusiastic about the whole thing. Maybe not the arson, but she would love the idea of new, clean things. A real sofa, not a bizarre love seat covered in a fabric that wasn’t velvet and without hard lumps that jabbed you in the neck. A bed that didn’t creak. New clothes that made her look like she had before. Not skinny, she’d not gained that much weight and anyways John was not that shallow. But full of life as she had been, sexy in her satin camisoles tucked in her high-waisted jeans.
For a few months there had been a pile of her old clothes in the conservatory, and he’d walked past them with a sigh of nostalgia every day. They were like old friends, reminders of a wife who was no more. A short houndstooth skirt that was one of her work staples, with a tight burgundy turtleneck. An emerald green silk dress she would wear out to bars, with knee-high suede black boots. Nowadays, she wore her daytime clothes at restaurants, not even bothering to change if there was a stain of baby food on her brightly coloured top.
They still went out, once a month, for what felt like government-mandated date nights that were getting more and more hollow. Tim was left with one of the grandmas while they hit some nice restaurant in central London, sat across from each other with nothing to say. It was important for your relationship to have regular date nights and reconnect, keep the romance alive without the stress of the kids. That’s what everybody said, that’s what everybody expected of them. It was the thing to do. It was unclear what the thing to do was if the person sat in front of you looked and sounded like your wife, but was nothing like her.
This would all pass, he knew. It was a rough patch, a stressful time in their marriage. At their fiftieth anniversary party, surrounded by their children and grandchildren, they would sneak away to the back of the marquee to have a quiet glass of champagne and this whole mess wouldn’t be but a footnote in their love story. The kids would grow up, they would start going to school and Florence would have more time for herself. She would slowly find her footing again, maybe start painting or maybe make a small business out of her passion for reupholstering furniture. He would come home to find her absorbed in her projects, streaks of paint on her beautiful face, her hair barely pulled back by a scarf, grinning as she showed him her progress.
One day, they would be out for a date night at their local country pub and she would tell him how sorry she was that she’d checked out all those years earlier. He would tell her it didn’t matter, because he had never stopped loving her. They would kiss by the roaring fire, and walk home through the fields to prevent a hangover. They’d make love trying not to wake the children, and have a lie-in the following morning. He’d bring her a breakfast tray in bed. It was little daydreams like these that kept John going day by day.
Moving would get them a step closer to that daydream. And it would give them enough room to not be constantly in each other’s pockets, which would probably help. Plus, the new house was much more to his taste. If he were honest, he did not care too much about what his home looked like as long as it was comfortable. Their current house had never been comfortable, but when they moved in he’d been so blindly in lust, and in love, with Florence that he just did not care. Plus, it was not even nearly as bad when it was just the two of them. But even at its peak, the current house had never been the sort of place he’d choose to live. The new house, on the other hand, was exactly what he’d been hoping for. Large, with plenty of space for children, dogs and guests. Georgian, with generous rooms filled with light and a big garden that gave onto the fields of Surrey. A family home, a forever home.
The current owners, an old couple, had raised their whole family in that house and it showed. The decor was outdated, the paint on the walls faded, mottled by the stains of little hands. A load of tribal and various ethnic decor from faraway places they’d probably never even visited. Maybe gifts from their children as they travelled. Maybe bought in the garden centre down the road, you never know. John loved the house just the way it was, even though he had promised Florence she would get to modernise the space. She’d talked about knocking down some walls, painting soothing white over the rich red of the sitting room and the marigold-yellow kitchen. Nevertheless, you could tell that the house had been loved intensely by its owners. They were ancient now: the husband must have had a stroke as his speech was slurred, the wife just sat there timid and confused as the estate agent showed them around. They were probably going to a home.
Their friends, other couples with whom they shared weekend outings to the petting zoo and National Trust places, were enthusiastic about the new house. They looked at pictures, excited to see it in person as soon as they could move. We’ll come visit, they said, even though John had the distinct feeling they would come a handful of times and then revert to their general unwillingness to cross the M25. Many of them would move out of London soon of their own accord, scattering themselves around the home counties like middle-class dandelion seeds. They would probably lose touch with most of them, and John didn’t really mind.
He liked their friends, but they were not irreplaceable. They would make new friends in Surrey, people whose houses were just walking distance from their own. Their children would attend the same schools, Florence would be on the PTA with the other wives and he could go running with the husbands at the weekends. Maybe they would all play tennis together.
Florence, on the other hand, was absolutely devastated. Her eyes filled with tears whenever they discussed seeing their friends less, and she seemed to be hell-bent on organising get-togethers at every possible opportunity. “I’ll miss them so much,” she would say on their way home, with a raspy voice.
He personally thought it wouldn’t be such a disaster if she got a new set of friends. None of the people they regularly saw now were from their lives before Tim: that crowd mostly hung out at night in wine bars and pubs and they had rapidly lost touch. They still saw each other occasionally, but John couldn’t imagine that moving to Surrey would actually make that much of a difference. Nor was she concerned with his mates, all from work, whom he would keep seeing every day. The people she would miss were their parenting friends and while they were perfectly nice, he very m
uch felt they were mostly her friends with attached husbands. He felt like an attached husband. The wives saw each other far more than the husbands did, meeting during the day for walks and at coffee shops. They complained a lot, mostly about how hard it was to be alone with their children all day. Florence might feel happier if she spent more time with some happier people.
The other benefit of moving was that it would get Florence further away from Corinne, which frankly couldn’t come too soon. John and Corinne had been sneaking around together for over a year, even though he’d been breathlessly obsessed with her for far longer. From the first day he saw her, really, sat behind the reception desk. She noticed him too, with her mint-green eyes that peered from underneath her thick black fringe, sharp as a leopard’s. She knew he was married, and never cared. She waited for him, like a predator, until he was so alone and lonely that all she had to do was stroll over and collect the pieces. She asked him out for a drink when Tim was just over four months old. John said no.
She asked him again six weeks later, and John watched himself say yes. He watched himself from above, like an out-of-body experience, as he waited for her shift to be over and walked out of the office with her, brazenly. He steered her to a crowded pub in Liverpool Street. He watched himself kiss her, his hand grabbing her bare knee like a claw, in the middle of the crowded bar area. They were less than a block away from work. Any number of acquaintances could have seen them, it was only a miracle that they didn’t.
A month later they slept together for the first time, in her room in an all-French flat-share in Chalk Farm. The morning after, he tried to get her fired in a panic. He had no luck, Corinne was beloved by everyone. She was beautiful, had a classy accent and was friendly to everyone. She’d cleared out the front desk of all clutter, and every Monday she brought in elaborate floral arrangements that gave the place a sophisticated look. Unless he was willing to make up a good reason for getting rid of her, she was staying. Over time, he came to be very grateful for that.
