by Phil Hogan
And now I opened the wardrobe. Here was the handsome tobacco-coloured rawhide cowboy jacket I’d seen him wear at weekends in the town with his gang and those excitable girls – perhaps Sarah herself had been there – who gathered around the games machines in the café.
How disappointing that Marrineau proved so lacking in imagination and substance. How little of him there was to cling to. The trick, I saw, was to step away before you felt the heat of a person. In the afternoon sunshine I could see the crowds of players running around and hear their distant shouts. I tried to pick Marrineau out, but he was too far away and much reduced. I put on the jacket, heavy and worn. It was too broad in the shoulders and yet in a way felt right and fitting enough. I stood at the window like the giant statue of Jesus above Rio de Janeiro, arms stretched wide, as if ready for crucifixion, long leather fringes hanging from the sleeves. To be honest, I felt like a king myself. And, of course, I too would rise again.
AUNT LILLIAN FOUND A private sixth-form college for me, starting in September. In the meantime, undoubtedly out of fear of having me creeping around her house for months, she fixed me up with a summer job at a firm of estate agents, Mower & Mower – two relatives with distant links to the family. It didn’t surprise me to learn that they were located a hundred miles away from Norfolk, or two hundred if you went by train. Old Mr Mower – the other Mr Mower was apparently long dead – picked me up from the station and drove me to my accommodation, a fragrant guesthouse run by a nice Mrs Burton whose bedroom, I discovered (some minutes after unpacking), was home to a vast collection of ceramic farm animals.
Mr Mower picked me up after breakfast. I was almost entirely ignorant of what estate agents actually did. But, oh my, when I found out – when we arrived at his client’s house and Mr Mower didn’t knock on the door but simply unlocked it and ushered me in …
‘The owners just give you their keys?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ said Mr Mower, taking off his trilby in deference to being in someone else’s house. ‘If they’re working, or on holiday, or too busy to be around. It happens often. Then you have to make sure you arrive in good time, ahead of the prospective buyer. Make sure everything is ship-shape.’
We made our way round the house, Mr Mower pointing things out. Upstairs, he opened a door to a large study with an old-fashioned writing desk and swivel chair and bookshelves and two small paintings on the wall. We went to look out of the window.
‘What can you tell me about the garden?’ he said.
‘The lawn has been mowed?’
‘Excellent. What else do you see?’
‘Trees? Bushes?’
‘Good boy. Which means it’s not overlooked by the neighbours. People like their privacy.’ Mr Mower tapped the side of his nose. ‘When the buyer arrives, that will be one of the first things I shall tell them.’
When the buyers turned up, a married couple with twin girls whom they left in the car busy plaiting each other’s hair, he gave them the same tour, but added things about the roof guarantee, low crime figures and good local schools. Then he drove me back to the office to meet his staff. Rita, his slow-moving secretary, explained the filing system and how to answer the telephone if everyone was busy. In the afternoon Mr Mower and I went out again to two more properties, one to measure it up for sale with the owners, counting the rooms and asking about the boiler and whether curtains would be included in the price. Mr Mower filled out a form as he talked. He introduced me to clients as ‘young William’.
By the end of that day I knew there was no way I would go back to school; that my life must begin anew here in this leafy, bustling town, as Mower & Mower’s sales literature called it, only forty-eight minutes by fast train from the centre of London. I instantly became the keenest, hardest-working employee the firm had ever had, and by the end of the summer Mr Mower was delighted, though taken aback, at my wish to stay on. Aunt Lillian, grateful for any result that kept me a hundred miles away from her, agreed to send me a monthly allowance, which I calculated would more than cover my meagre living expenses and allow my modest wages to mount up in the bank. ‘And do you know what you need?’ said Mr Mower, beaming. ‘Driving lessons.’
Although he had two sales consultants, Guy and Stella, I was the one Mr Mower took under his wing. Guy, who was probably in his late twenties, glowered, and would invent menial tasks for me to do, or send me to the café to queue for his lunchtime sandwich and various unhealthy snacks. He took pills for a mood-altering stomach ulcer. But I brought out the mothering instinct in Stella, the senior of the two, who occasionally brought me in a baked edible from home and twinkled with quiet amusement as I followed Mr Mower hither and thither, carrying his bag, but also internalizing the nuanced lessons of mortgaging, conveyancing and consumer law, or helping him dream up new marketing strategies and ads for the paper. He taught me how to read detailed blueprints and always to look a man in the eye. On my nineteenth birthday, in front of the whole staff, he presented me with a pair of opera glasses. (‘For roof inspections,’ he explained. ‘A crucial part of the agent’s armoury.’) He decided that I had a creative bent and had me accompany Cliff, the photographer, to clients’ houses as artistic director. Perhaps he feared that I would get bored. Perhaps he thought, as a young man who had forfeited the chance of university – renounced, as Mr Mower saw it, the life of the mind – that I required every last intellectual stimulus that selling houses could offer. In fact it was all the stimulation I needed.
It was months, however, before I found myself alone with a house to plunder. Rita tended to arrange visits when the client was at home; Cliff would pick me up at the office in his van and then after the job would drop me back there. It was a while before I realized that Cliff, who worked at a photographic supplies shop in town, could simply be sent on his way once we’d done the job. So, when Rita announced one day that I would have to let myself into a property with a set of keys, it was as if I had spent my life preparing for it. I worked with Cliff as usual, pointing up the most saleable aspects of the house, taking the dustbins out of shot and so on. Afterwards I told him I had other errands, and would walk back to the office.
‘Ah, I get it,’ he chuckled, in his Welsh accent. ‘A bit of time off, is it? A bit of truanting? Well, don’t worry, I won’t tell.’ He winked.
How perfect. Perhaps he had errands too.
Once he was out of the way I doubled back and let myself into the house again. I didn’t have much time and I didn’t know much about the couple who lived there, but I’d been round the house once with Cliff and knew which cupboards and drawers I needed to get into. I sat on the sofa in the front room and popped grapes from the fruit bowl into my mouth while I leafed through photographs and bills and letters. They had a piano, and a son not much younger than me to play it. I imagined they were nice parents. And I envisaged a teenage boy they could be proud of. But who could know?
I know now that you can’t know everything about everyone. You have to think of it as a thrilling, ongoing project. Crossing the threshold of a strange house is like the opening line of a gripping story. At its best, penetrating deeper, it is like falling in love.
So, even as I locked the door, I knew I had to go back. I had a copy of the key made at the shoe repairer’s on the high street (these days any outlying supermarket will do it without so much as a good morning, and certainly without wondering what you need it for), and handed the original back to Rita. By the time I went into the house again a week later I had my own camera – an expensive Polaroid bought out of my savings from Cliff’s shop (‘Oh, it’s your own camera now, is it? I’d better watch out!’). I took pictures of everything, and I borrowed documents – contracts, scribbled notes, bank statements, payslips, passports, birth certificates, address books – which I then photocopied in the library in the evenings. I took a file from the stationery room at the office and filled it with their secrets. How I came to adore these people! When I sat down with an album of photographs they had taken one summe
r in the Canary Islands, I felt the sun on my own face; heard with my own ears the cries of their fellow holidaymakers across the blue pool. It delighted me to follow their busy schedule, chart their routines gleaned from the calendar hanging from a magnetized hook on the fridge or from the grey desk diary in the sideboard drawer in the hall where I left my mark (the first of many in this town) scraped inside the walnut case of an old chiming clock. One morning I watched the family leave their house at 8.20 in their blue estate. The next morning I saw them arrive at Wengham Grammar, where the boy got out (8.32) without a word and stomped up the drive carrying his flute case. The morning after, I was at the station in time to see the estate turn into the car park (8.39), where the man of the house got out and, pausing to plant a kiss on his wife’s offered cheek, took the 8.55 to London, where I happened to know he worked as an accountant for GGV, a French-owned insurance company. The next morning (8.45), equipped with my opera glasses, I watched his wife arrive at the upmarket Aube Massey store in town, where she sold soft furnishings on the second floor. That lunchtime, I saw her at work, showing customers bolts of fabric in her saleslady’s white blouse and black skirt and fashionably tousled hair, clacking back across the sales floor in her heels to answer the telephone. As she passed I recognized her perfume from the master bedroom. It almost came as a surprise to hear her speak.
So there we are. I squeezed the juice out of them, though they didn’t know it. Simon and Jennifer (Jenny) Finch and their young Thomas, 45 Holland Road. They were my first subject. The first butterfly pinned to my board. There would be rarer and brighter ones, but they were the first.
And so we love, we tire, and we move on. Eventually the house was sold, of course, but I didn’t mind. I knew where they’d gone (3 The Maples, on the north side of town). And who could say that I wouldn’t get a hankering to see them again one day when the world had turned a few more times and the adventure seemed fresh and thrilling once more.
The new people, incidentally, were equally fascinating. That’s another story, but also the point. They are all other stories.
In case I haven’t said, this was the job from heaven.
But, you ask, what does this become? I can say that it grows and evolves and makes its own idiosyncratic demands; that it’s a faith or master that will not be easily spoken against by ordinary reason; that this faith or master is a joy to serve; and that you proceed from first principles.
To start, there is the easy pleasure of the kind you might describe as ‘entry level’ – i.e., that arising from access gained via legitimate means. The client hands you the key, you arrive at the house an hour or so ahead of the buyer, you absorb the atmosphere and carry out a little groundwork, you leave your mark and you open a file.
But then the challenge. The day comes when the view from the foothills has grown too familiar and you feel the lure of higher, bracing air, the urge to add a layer of complexity. You feel your breath quicken. You bind yourself to the category of uninvited guest. Now comes the question of weighing the balance of elements peculiar to a property. What are the chances of getting in and out without being noticed? What does the interior layout present in terms of risk and reward? Are you going to end up on a roof, looking for a drainpipe? Are you looking for relaxation today, or danger? Novelty? Endurance? Degree of difficulty? Or the sublime euphoria of full immersion? (I should say that the latter, though it can and surely must be done – more of which later – is not for the faint-hearted or the unprepared.)
For now, let us say there are varieties of hazard. Here lies the frisson of apprehension and planning. But also calamity. What would be an obvious act of madness in ordinary circumstances assumes, in a dazzling burst of enthusiasm, the shape of a reachable, ripe desire. Any fool, for example, might work out that a flat is much easier to get into when the owner is out than to get out of when the owner is in (having arrived back unexpectedly and slammed the door and sighed with relief, perhaps at the thought of a well-earned cup of tea). So I should mention the day I most resembled the other sort of fool. I thought I was being daring, opportunistic – and, to be frank, with a few years under my belt I would have seen what to do, would more instantly have balanced those elements before me and turned what looked hopeless into an opportunity of a rarer kind. What followed, instead, was ignominious and sudden flight, which no doubt distressed the poor owner (a woman and her grocery shopping) in the midst of filling her kettle. Don’t ask what I would have done if she had seen me. All I know is that, though I had barely started out in this admittedly singular endeavour, I already felt I had everything to lose. But I took the lesson to heart. After seventeen years I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I have been surprised in the act, if not physically caught – mostly from expecting too much pleasure from too little thinking. I have only once been challenged face to face (again, more of which later).
If anything, these days I suffer from a superabundance of alertness to hazard. I know where the exits are. Over the years, I have become birdlike, wary of minor fluctuations. For the most part, the daily crumbs of bread are there for the taking – nothing more menacing than a breath of wind shakes the leaves; a change in shadow signifies only the movement of cloud. But still one prepares for an earthquake.
And so what it becomes, to answer your question, is second nature. Here, among strangers’ belongings, is where I am most at home, moving quietly and surely. I know where they keep their private things, how they arrange their lives. I follow their plans and make mine around them. I try not to enquire deeply into the why, but humbly accept my gift, the exhilaration of being here, of breathing the air at this altitude. I will confess there is ritual. I leave my mark using the key to a red moneybox my mother gave me. I will eat or drink something, perhaps take a small keepsake – a teaspoon, a sock. But I also have my standards. No hidden cameras, wires or microphones are used in the making of my ‘art’. I don’t peep through windows. Where is the pleasure in that? I am not a stalker, or a voyeur. I am simply sharing an experience, a life as it happens. Think of me as an invisible brother or uncle or boyfriend. I’m no trouble. I may be there when you are, or when you are gone, or more likely just before you arrive. I agree it is an idea that takes some getting used to. But do we not all have a life to make, to mould it somehow around that of others, to search for the dovetail that seems best to fit?
Who could argue with that?
TWO THINGS HAPPENED WHEN I was twenty-one. The first was that I inherited what was left of my mother’s money and invested it, along with my savings from Mower’s, in four acres of disused railyard that ran along the wrong side of the river, facing the backs of a stretch of derelict, boarded-up commercial properties.
The second thing was that Guy left the firm. For some months he’d been ill, having managed to poison himself, as Stella told it, courtesy of a thawing chicken in his fridge that had dripped into a dish of cooked pasta on the shelf below. He kept threatening to get well but then got worse again. He lost nearly twenty kilos in weight, and at some stage it was not unreasonably decided by Mr Mower that Guy’s recovery was likely to keep him off work for longer than a middling family business could reasonably bear. Obviously we all sympathized, but he had no alternative, he said, but to wish Guy well and pay off his contract with the firm.
In view of Guy’s often high-handed treatment of me, I couldn’t say I was sorry to see him go. At first it had been low-level sniping dressed up as teasing, usually out of earshot of Mr Mower. That much might have been expected. But things had begun to change. Although I was still officially the trainee, I had long since done my day releases at college and passed my driving test and by now had handled and completed a number of sales in the way Mr Mower had taught me – adopting his old-fashioned manners and the tweedy dress and thick-soled brogues of the country town professional, courtesy of Hilde & Son, local gentlemen’s outfitters. I was the coming man. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that Guy would take it so personally.
It was some we
eks before his first spell in hospital that he engineered a crisis in the office that led to a rift between Mr Mower and me. The first I knew of it was when Mr Mower stormed furiously into the office one morning, having just called a client from home with regard to their imminent exchanging of contracts on Brierley Grange.
‘Mrs Wendell was very puzzled,’ Mr Mower said, looking at us all. ‘Can anyone guess why she was very puzzled?’
No one could guess.
‘Because it turns out that the Wendells pulled out of the Brierley Grange sale two days ago.’ Mr Mower waited for the import of his words to sink in. ‘Yes, I’m astonished too. But it seems she left a message on our answerphone first thing Wednesday morning. And when no one called back, she rang again in the afternoon. And spoke to a young man …’
It was now that Guy looked pointedly at me – indeed, led the others to look at me – causing me in turn to pause for a second, as if … could it have been me? No … no, I absolutely hadn’t spoken to Mrs Wendell. Had I? The seed of doubt was sprouting and blossoming because Mr Mower, while not quite actually accusing me, was addressing me directly on how the devil anyone could be capable of such blatant negligence, that it simply wasn’t good enough, and that the collapse of this sale had now derailed four of our other properties down the line, leaving a fine old damned mess. ‘I’ll get on to it,’ Guy said, wedging the phone between his jaw and shoulder. While Rita dug out contact numbers, I continued to protest my innocence – pointing out that in fact I now distinctly remembered coming in on Wednesday morning to find no messages on the answerphone and thinking it was unusual. But no one cared about the answerphone now, and the more I protested, the more Mr Mower said, with some crossness, that the damage was done, and soon everyone was busy on the phone while I stood by until Guy completed my public shaming by suggesting I make myself useful by running out to the café for doughnuts. ‘I need fuel,’ he said importantly.
