A Desirable Residence: A Novel of Love and Real Estate - Hardcover

'Mrs Chambers . . . ?'

'Oh yes, sorry,' said Liz, and turned back. 'I was listening.' She smiled at the estate agent. He didn't smile back.

'I did warn your husband at the time the property went on the market,' he said, 'that this might happen. I advised a price rather lower than your asking price.'

'I know you did,' agreed Liz. She wondered why he felt it necessary to remind her. Was he feeling defensive? Did he experience a need to justify himself; explain why their house had been on the market for ten months with his agency and had failed to sell? She studied his young, well-shaven face for signs of I-told-you-so; if-you'd-listened-to-me . . .

But his face was serious. Concerned. He was probably, she thought, not the sort of person who would countenance recriminations. He was simply pointing out the facts.

'And now,' he was saying, 'you must make a decision. You have, as I see it, two realistic options.' And a few unrealistic ones? Liz wanted to ask, but instead she looked intelligently at him, leaning forward slightly in her chair to show she was interested. She was beginning to feel rather hot; the sun was beating brightly through the panes of glass onto her cheeks. As usual, she had completely misjudged the early-morning weather and dressed for a brisk autumn day. She should perhaps remove a layer of clothing. But the thought of taking off her unwieldy jersey--which would necessitate first removing her spectacles and Alice band--to reveal a crumpled denim shirt, which might or might not be stained with coffee, seemed too much to contemplate. Especially in front of this smooth estate agent. She glanced surreptitiously at him. He didn't seem to be too hot; his face was tanned but not at all flushed and his cuffs looked crisp and cool. Starched, probably, she thought, by his girlfriend. Or perhaps, bearing in mind how young he looked, his mother. The thought amused her.

'Two options,' she said, more agreeably than she had intended.

A flicker of something like relief passed across his face. Perhaps he had been expecting a scene. But before Liz could react to it, he was back into well-grooved, grown-up professionalism.

'The first option,' he said, 'would be to put your house back on the market and drop the price considerably.' Of course, thought Liz. Any fool could have told me that.

'By about how much?' she asked politely. 'Realistically speaking,' she added for good measure, stifling a sudden, inappropriate urge to giggle. This conversation was unreal. Next thing she'd be saying, Let's have the cards on the table, or, Would you run that by me again . . . Pull yourself together, she told herself sternly. This is serious.

'Fifty thousand pounds. At least.'

Liz's head jerked up in shock. The giggle rising up inside her suddenly subsided; she felt shamefaced. No wonder this boy's handsome face was so concerned. He was more worried about her situation than she was. And, to give him his due, it was worrying.

'We've already reduced it by twenty,' she said, noting with slight horror that her voice was shaking. 'And that's less than the mortgage.'

'I know,' he said. He looked down at the papers on his desk. 'I'm afraid the market has dropped considerably since you bought.'

'Not that much. It can't have.' Belated worry made her belligerent. Of course she had seen the headlines in the papers. But she'd always skimmed them with her eyes; assumed they had no relevance to her. She'd avoided the chat of friends, some overtly anxious, others smugly triumphant. The property market this, the property market that. For heaven's sake. Stupid phrase, anyway. The property market . . . It made her think of rows of market stalls covered in tiny houses, each with a price label tied around the chimney.

'We can't sell it for so little,' she added. She could feel her cheeks growing even more hot. 'We just can't. We won't have enough to pay back the bank, and we only got the mortgage for the tutorial college on the basis of selling the house. We had some people interested in it then; they actually made an offer.' She stopped. A tide of humiliation seeped through her. How much older than this young man was she? And here she was, blurting out all her money worries; looking to him for an answer.

But he didn't look as though he had one. His fingers ruffled the papers on his desk anxiously; he avoided her eye. 'I'm confident that if you reduced the asking price by the amount I suggested, we would have a sale within a very reasonable time-scale,' he said. He sounded as though he was reading from a prompt card.

'Yes, but we need more money than that!' cried Liz. 'We've got a mortgage to pay off . And now we've got a business to run. And what's a reasonable time-scale anyway?' Too late, she realized her error. The estate agent's head shot up, an unmistakable look of relief on his face at having been given a question he could answer.

'Ah, well, these things always take a certain length of time,' he began. 'We'll be promoting the house afresh, highlighting the reduced price, targeting a different purchaser altogether.'

As his voice droned on, happily outlining the benefits of local advertising and colour photography, Liz's gaze wandered. She felt suddenly drained, worried and fearful. She had not, she realized, taken the sale of the house seriously enough. When the first buyers had pulled out, she had almost been pleased. She could hardly bear the idea of strangers in their home, using their bathroom, their kitchen, sunbathing in their garden. Even though she had been the driving force behind the move in the first place.

Of course, Jonathan couldn't understand that. One night, several months ago, she had broken down in a torrent of weeping at the thought of leaving the house for good, and he had stared at her in amazement.

'But you were the one who wanted to do all this,' he had said, almost shouted. 'It was your idea to buy the tutorial college in the first place.'

'I know it was,' she wailed, tears streaming hotly out of her eyes. 'But I still don't want to leave this house.' He gazed at her for a few seconds in stupefaction. Then his expression changed.

'All right, darling, then we won't.' His voice suddenly firm, he lifted her chin and looked into her teary eyes, in a gesture straight out of a 1940s film. 'We'll stay here. We'll stay where we're happy. I'll phone the solicitors tomorrow.'

'Oh Jonathan, why are you so stupid!' Liz jerked her chin out of his grasp impatiently. She wiped her nose with her hand and pushed it exasperatedly through her hair. A second wave of tears, feeble and benign, squeezed their way onto her cheeks. 'You never understand anything. Of course we're not going to stay here.'

She had given a huge, shuddering sigh, and got up to close the window. When she returned to bed, Jonathan was facing the other way, not out of resentment, she was sure, but out of complete bewilderment. And she had realized that she really wasn't being fair on him. Jonathan was inherently cautious; naturally unambitious. It had taken a lot of her enthusiasm to persuade him into this enterprise. And here she was, weeping distressingly at him, worrying him unnecessarily.

'Sorry,' she had said, taking his narrow hand, watching his shoulders relax. 'I'm just tired.'

Since then, she had gone to the other extreme; maintaining a blithe, positive approach that swept them all along, through the documentation, delivery vans and detritus of the move; into the shabby little flat that they were now to live in; out of safety and into precarious uncertainty. While Jonathan paced anxiously about the small, dusty rooms of their new home, searching for plug sockets; while Alice shuffled around blackly, in conspicuous, unspecified teenage gloom, she had been the one to smile, and throw open tea chests and sing Beatles songs, cheerfully mismatching tunes and lyrics. She had been the strong one; the face of reassurance. But now reassurance seemed to have slipped adroitly away from her, as though recognizing too great an adversary in the tidings of this fresh-faced, droning messenger.

'A good interior makes all the difference,' he was saying, as Liz's senses snapped back into focus. 'There's a lot of competition out there; people with Jacuzzi bathrooms; conservatories . . .' He looked at her expectantly. 'I don't suppose you'd consider installing a power shower? It might help attract buyers.'

'Instead of dropping the price?' said Liz, in slight relief. 'Well, I don't see why not.'

'As well as dropping the price, I meant,' said the estate agent, in a tone of almost amusement. It was that tone which suddenly touched her on the raw.

'You want us to drop the price and install a new shower?' She heard her voice screech; felt her face adopt the expression of outrage which she usually reserved for her most thoughtless pupils. 'Do you realize,' she added, slowly and clearly, as though to a class of sulky sixthformers, 'that we are selling our house because we actually need the money? That we haven't decided to go and live in a tiny poky flat because we want to, but because we have to?' She could feel herself gathering momentum. 'And you're telling me that because you haven't been able to sell our house, we've got to put in a new shower at a cost of goodness knows how much, and then we've got to drop the pric...