Our other piece of good news is no surprise to me, though I accept it might be to you. I wouldn't want you to think that the whole of this book is about confusion, incompetence and occasional bumbling by accident into the right course. Mostly on my part. Not at all. Because when it comes to selling our existing house, I do something clever. I'm not given to self-congratulation, but I figure by now you may be hungry for something that deserves an out-and-out celebration.
You'll remember that I had a crack at selling the house myself, but without a single nibble. So in the end, I'd had to hang my head in failure before the knowing smirk of an estate agent. Well, at that point there were three lots of potential buyers, who'd set themselves apart from the others by actually phoning back with a question after their viewing. Is the flowering currant bush legally protected? Where's the nearest bread shop? No more than that. So when we signed on with the agent, I insisted that if we happened to sell to any of these three, whom I'd found myself, no commission would be payable to him. He'd agreed, with the kind of look busy adults give children who're insisting they don't want CocoPops but Frosties instead.
So now, after six weeks, a couple from the Home Counties phone to say they'd like a second viewing that same afternoon. We scamper about, scrubbing the place from porch to loft, stuffing all the bright blue, half-opened bags of compost into the shed, and we've just remembered to switch on the coffee machine and the bread-maker, when the doorbell rings.
The couple have brought their mother, who lives in a village just outside Stow. We invite them to wander around on their own, with Mum choosing to settle herself on the sofa, where I chat with her, while Maggie lurks about trying to overhear the conversation upstairs. They seem keenish, and even measure up where a sideboard and a boat trailer might fit. Then off they go to think some more.
The comforting news is that they're on our list of three leftovers. The discouraging bit is that they haven't even put their own house on the market yet. And as every house-seller knows, that's hopeless. So we just enjoy the super-clean house and forget about them.
Two weeks later, the action starts.
Or rather stutters.
Our computer has come down with an infection and emails are being routed through to my mobile. Now you may have an image of my Blackberry or iPhone lighting up every couple of minutes and zipping webpages and videos across its busy screenette. Forget it. I'm too mean to invest in that sort of technology. What happens is, at 9 a.m. one morning, my Nokia 0000001 clangs twice like a ship's bell to announce the arrival of a text in capital letters. As usual, it shows only the first dozen words before it shuts down. I glance at the message and realise it could be life-changing. So, fresh out of the shower, I drop my towel, and scuttle naked down the stairs, calling, 'Maggie, Maggie, look at this, look at this.'
'Not a lot new there,' she says, as I gambol into the kitchen.
'It's an email on the phone, from the Home Counties folk,' I cry, and jabbing a wet finger on the Down button, I read it out. 'THANKS FOR GIVING US THE OPPORTUNITY OF LOOKING AT YOUR HOME AGAIN WERE NOW WAITING FOR OUR PURCHASERS SURVEYOR BUT'
'But, but… what?' she demands.
'It's the phone,' I explain. 'It'll come. Wait a minute.'
'But the Home Counties folk said they hadn't even started to look for a buyer for their place.'
'Well, I suppose things must have moved quick,' I guess. And I've just started to run up the stairs for a bathrobe, when the bell clangs again to announce the arrival of the next batch of words, so I turn in mid flight and sprint back into the kitchen, poking the green button as I go, to bring up the next episode, which is, 'IN VIEW OF THE FACT THAT OUR PURCHASERS HAVE INVOLVED BUILDERS FOR A LOFT CONVERSION WE FEEL CONFIDENT IN MAKING YOU AN'
This time we stand staring at the phone, me rubbing my backside where I scraped it against the oven-door handle on my last entry. It's a reliable old thing, the phone, and after about four minutes, it finishes its sentence: 'OFFER SUBJECT TO CONTRACT OF £*{],%@@ WITH COMPLETION END JULY ALL THE BEST KEITH AND RUTH.'
I jump about and abuse the phone in terms unsuitable for the ears of our prospective buyers' mother in a village just outside Stow.
'You're talking to inanimate objects again,' says Maggie. 'What's it mean?' she asks, looking over my elbow and pointing at the '£*{],%@@'.
I explain between expletives that my mobile does this sometimes. It thinks numbers are some kind of secret message which it has to encode.
'So we'd better speak to them,' Maggie suggests.
'No, no, that'd make us look flaky. It's easy enough to work it out.' And I explain that the symbols are on an alternative keyboard in the phone's memory and if we match them to the numeric keyboard, we can decode the figure. She looks at me as though I'm lecturing on black holes.
It takes about half an hour. Pausing only to drape a kitchen towel round my loins, I draw four grids on separate sheets of paper, insert symbols and figures, place the papers on top of each other, then hold them up to the light so I can see which match what. I then transcribe the resulting numbers onto a fifth sheet, which gives me the Home Counties folk's bid.
It's slightly more than double the asking price, which does seem overgenerous on their part. I'm just about to check that I've got the sheets of paper in the correct order, when Maggie comes back into the room.
'They're offering £55,000 below what we want,' she announces.
'How do you know?'
'I just phoned them.'
So the excitement is short-lived. We text them a polite rejection and it's back to the agent.
A week later they edge up their offer. After a mini-summit, Maggie and I dribble our asking price down a mite. And this edging and dribbling goes on for a fortnight. But the Home Counties folk are still far short of what would make the 'in' and 'out' figures balance on our budget spreadsheet.
Still it does seem clear that both of us want a deal. So we spend an evening extracting average prices from my stack of NEC brochures, double-checking the results against Nik's magic formula, and deciding how much more we need to squeeze out of our buyers. Then we develop a strategy. And the next afternoon, when Maggie comes back from the shop, we put it into action. The phone call is brief. I've got notes in front of me.
'It seems to us,' I start, 'that you like our house, and we're anxious to sell it, now. So why don't we split the difference? We'd absolutely understand if that doesn't fit your budget and you said "No." In that case, we'd both look elsewhere. If you say "Yes," we'll be out by the end of the month, and you can move in.'
They call back twenty minutes later. It's 'Yes.'
Next morning, I phone the estate agent and tell him we've sold without him. There's silence for about ten seconds, then he just says, 'Crikey.'
It's one of the sweetest moments of my life.
CHAPTER 14
THE WEDDING,
A TWO ACT DRAMA
The next three weeks are occupied by the most miserable event that can afflict any of us in the normal run of our lives. It's right down there with divorce (I know, I've had two of them), or discovering your home's been burgled (only one of these for me), being made redundant (one), and getting pneumonia on your eighth birthday (obviously just the one, but it felt like four at the time).
It's... MOVING HOUSE.
The Home Counties folk are anxious to take over Maggie's old home and we need their money, so we have to find somewhere temporary to live while The Old Stables is being built.
We've set ourselves a meagerish budget for the monthly rent, on the grounds that it will only be for a few months, so we can rough it. We troop round all the estate agents in the district, carefully avoiding the one who'd been fairly cheated out of the commission on our sale, and get shown scores of identical ten-year old terraced hovels. They all have lawns that look like motorway verges but a lot smaller, from which you enter a front door that leads straight onto the beer-sploshed carpet of the lounge, half of whose area is under the stairs, which go up to two
cupboards and a cracked bath. Even the agents don't bother rehashing standard comment number five, 'It just needs a little TLC. It's very cosy, really.' Instead, they loiter at the door and say nothing. I suppose they're trying to get us to move upmarket and so improve their commission. And it works.
On the fourth day, Maggie says, 'I can't do it any more. I'm going to be sick if I see another one.' Fair point. So we go back into the office of the latest agent and tell her what she's been hoping to hear from us all morning. She goes into instant gush mode: 'I've got the very thing for you. It's in the village of Blockley. It's only come in this morning. I haven't even seen it myself yet. So we could all go off and explore it together, couldn't we?' This is a question that requires a reply only if you're a character in an Enid Blyton adventure.
Mill Cottage is about a hundred yards down a driveway on the outskirts of Blockley. It sits in the several acres of grounds attached to a rambling eighteenth century house which the agent tells us was once a watermill. Mill Cottage has its own private garden with a stream running through it. Ducks come waddling over to greet us as we walk up the path to the oak stable-door. Inside, the rooms are not cottagy at all. They're all spacious. And light. There are big French windows that look out over the brook and across farmland to a tree-topped ridge. There's an inglenook fireplace. You probably think I've gone over to the enemy and done an estate agent's starter-pack course. But if I tell you that neither Maggie nor I turn a hair when the agent says the rent is double our original budget, and if I add that we merely look at each other and nod, then you'll understand that my sugary language is no marketing ploy.
Having signed up without further debate back at the agent's office, we get in the car and Maggie straightaway says, 'Do you think we've done the right thing?'
'Well, we've now bust our budget by several thou,' I reply.
'I know. But I couldn't have lived in any of those student squat places we saw before. I'd have woken up each morning itching all over.'
'I know, I know. I think we're going to need the pleasurable comforts of Mill Cottage, Blockley each evening, if we're going to stay sane over the next few months.' Maggie nods, and I add, 'It's going to be a
stressful time.'
What am I talking about? 'Going to be…' What's it been then for the past six months? But it's true. It's about to get worse, by a jumbo-sized bundle.
What makes MOVING HOUSE such a down-there miserable event is the taking-all-the-little-things-in the-house-and-wrapping-them-in-paper-and-stuffing-them-in-boxes-that-you-then-inadequately-label, which is followed by living-for-what-seems-an-age-in-a-small-warehouse-full-of-boxes-not-able-to-find-anything, and then there's the all-the-big-things-being-carted-away-till-your-home-is-as-lonely-looking-as-a-prison-release-hostel. It's not these acts in themselves that are so depressing, it's what they represent. The stability of your life, the ordinariest bits of it that you rely on and that you usually take for granted, are suddenly attacked, beaten up and kidnapped. So over the next few days whenever Maggie says something encouraging or helpful – in the way that women do all the time no matter how awful the world around them becomes – I just snort a 'hhHH' produced by a sharp intake of air at the back of the nose, or snap out a 'What do you mean!'
You see, MOVING HOUSE is bringing home to me the true, dreadful scale of the whole stables conversion project we're undertaking. It's as though we're dismantling our ship from under us while we're sailing on it out at sea, and then expecting to build a new one while we're floating about on the waves. And it's too late to change our minds. We're in mid Atlantic, hundreds of miles from the nearest shipping lanes and the sky up-wind's looking black. My only hope is that the delights of Mill Cottage will make us feel like we've washed up on a pleasant little island, not our ultimate New World destination, but similar enough to a Caribbean holiday resort that I'll feel able to abandon these increasingly tedious seafaring metaphors.
The day comes.
Maggie's house, my house, our house, has been stripped bare the day before by the removal men and we've spent the night squirming about on a double lilo, just the thing you need in mid ocean, after picking at takeaway chicken balti and spicy ladies' fingers in polystyrene trayettes while sitting on the floor.
At 9.04 a.m. we lock the door for the last time. Maggie peels off to the shop, and I sit outside in the car waiting for a phone call from the office of Mr Joshua Hurley, our solicitor, to say the Home Counties folk's money has been transferred across. It comes at 10.05 a.m., and eight minutes later the new owners of Maggie's house arrive, all chirpy and sporting milk cartons and kettles and mugs and packets of tea. I shake Keith's spare hand, give him the keys, wish them both luck, and clear off.
Over at Blockley, the trouble has started early. I arrive to find the giant removals van locking horns with a sturdy beech tree at the start of the drive that leads to Mill Cottage.
The driver winds down his window and passes down his expert judgement, 'We're going to have to unload it all into a littler van that can get underneath the branches, then shuttle up and down to the front door.'
'How long's that going to take?' I ask in plaintive tone.
He shrugs the corners of his mouth, 'Fair few hours, I'd say.'
His mate in the passenger seat leans over, and adds helpfully, 'The boss says he can't get a littler van here before two.' The driver winds up his window and I catch sight of him unscrewing the top to his flask before the steam condenses on the glass and blurs my view.
It's eleven o'clock so I head off into the centre of Blockley in search of refreshment for body and spirit. Alongside the village green – it's an odd affair because it sits up at one end about 8-feet higher than the road – there's a shop-cum-post office, and the woman behind the counter sends me off on my quest for tea and possibly sandwiches, across the road, through the mournful churchyard, and into a tiny square containing two tables with parasols and chairs. It's the home of Murray's, a cafe which I see, as soon as I enter, doubles as a deli.
Blockley is going to be my sort of village.
As soon as I've sat down and picked up the menu, a voice calls out, 'Hello there, how are you doing today?' It belongs to a chap in his thirties who's topping off a couple of cappuccinos with chocolate powder alongside a stack of glass cabinets packed with irregular shaped slices of carrot cake, lardy loaf, and extra-thick cream strawberry torte with brownie mix topping. Murray's is the size of place where everybody's within chatting distance of the counter.
'A helluva lot better for being in here,' I reply.
'That's what we like to hear,' he says. 'Be with you in a tick.' And what seems like a second later, he's at my table, having meanwhile delivered the cappuccinos to their destination somewhere behind me.
'What's it to be today?'
'Have you got Red Bush tea?'
'Yup.'
'… and…' I scan the glass cases… 'a slice of lardy cake.' The selection is such that you can feel lardy cake is the slimmer's option.
'Good choice,' he says. 'It's made by a lady just down the road, and popped out of her oven only a couple of hours ago.' He nips back behind the counter and while he's organising the tea bags and lardy, asks, 'You just visiting Blockley?'
I explain that we're renting here for six or eight months while we have the restoration work done in Stow.
'Sounds like Grand Designs,' he says, back now at the table.
'Well, more Modest Little Plans really.'
'Lots of luck. Let me know if you need anything else. Help yourself to a newspaper if you want. Hi Charlie. Hi Martha. And what have you got?' The bell over the door's just clanged and he's crouching down now beside a grinning little girl who's thrusting Paddington Bear in his face.
Once I've moved on through sea bass fishcakes, salad and fresh baked bread (I figure the cake was elevenses and then it's time for lunch, but I do make a mental note to go to the gym this week), while scanning the Telegraph and the Guardian (you can't be too careful in a new village home, you don
't want to offend political sensibilities before you've even scraped the mud from your boots), I realise it's time to go and supervise the removers.
'That was excellent,' I say, fishing out my wallet.
'Great. My name's Chris by the way.'
'Good to meet you, Chris. I'm Derek. And Maggie and I will be back in here. Often, I'd say.'
'Thanks. I'm afraid the bad news is though that we're going to be shutting in a few weeks' time.'
'Oh really? Not enough business for you here?'
'It's just time to move on.'
'That's a shame. Seems to be that's what's happening in a lot of villages. Places like this shutting down.'
A Horse in the Bathroom Page 11
