Chapter 7 #3
The sale and purchase of this grand old house was now legally binding.
He’d paid the 10 per cent deposit. The vendor had agreed to an early access agreement to allow for contractors to be taken through the house to provide quotes for the work needed, although it would be weeks before the sale completed and any work could actually start.
The amount of work needed was daunting, to say the least. Luc entered the foyer with its peeling plasterwork, stained floorboards and the spray-painted graffiti left behind by squatters.
His gaze went to a faded symbol on a door behind the staircase which he knew led to the kitchens.
CW33, with the threes mirroring each other, back-to-back.
If you knew, you knew. Camberwell Ward, Block Thirty Three – the most desirable gang to belong to on that estate.
When he’d entered this house for the first time and had spotted that amongst all the rubbish and filth the walls were covered in, he’d taken it as a sign that this was the place.
He’d been standing at an intersection of his own two worlds. A house that could have been a twisted nightmare of Tom’s house, and the symbol representing kids whose lives had been lacking so much that a brotherhood of crime and violence offered more.
He’d been standing in a place where he could potentially make a life-changing difference. To the new generation of those kids.
And to himself.
Luc let himself into the one-bedroom apartment that had once been a huge reception room.
A ballroom even? A drunken chandelier, with big gaps in its strings of crystals, hung from the crumbling plaster of an ornate ceiling rose.
Faded velvet curtains had hems that looked like they’d been chewed by rats.
Taps dripped in a bathroom with a broken toilet and tendrils of ivy were pushing through gaps in a boarded-up sash window.
There was a smell of decay that might have been black mould or dry rot or maybe something that hadn’t survived a fall between the walls or down a chimney.
The amount of work required to get anywhere near his vision was more than anyone else had been prepared to consider.
It would be some time before even an estimate of the time involved could be made.
Hazards had to be removed and unsafe utilities disconnected before the first contractors could be allowed in and there would be a queue, starting with the structural engineers who would detail everything from the integrity of the roof to any subsidence of the foundations and all the damage and deterioration between so that a scope of works could be drawn up.
It might be a year or more before they could start stripping the house back to its original floorplan so they could start again and create the spaces a youth centre would need.
And they might need that long to get planning permission.
There were so many unknowns. Perhaps the most worrying was how much it was all going to cost. Luc had made more money in the last eighteen months than he’d ever dreamt of earning from his art, but who knew how long that kind of income could last?
Maybe he needed to stop indulging himself with dystopian fantasy and put more energy into building something reliable.
Moreish Photography was already a solid business but it could be about a lot more than food.
He had built up a network amongst caterers.
It would only be a logical sidestep to move into visual content for the events those caterers were covering.
Like weddings? Real weddings like the ones Gregory Glasson had spent his career recording? Like the one he’d just done in Provence.
The kind of romantic destination dream weddings that Marry Me in Provence specialised in?
Pfft…
Luc turned on his heel and headed for the door of this room, moving fast, as if he wanted to leave both the room and that thought behind.
He was almost at the front door of the house, the keys in his hand to lock up again, when his phone buzzed.
It was an unknown number.
A French number.
Very few people had this number. Had the property manager of his building in Draguignan changed his phone, perhaps? Was there a problem with his apartment?
He answered the call. Politely but just a little cautiously.
‘All?, oui?’
‘Luc?’
He froze.
‘It’s Sophie.’
He knew that. How could he not have known that when the sound of her voice felt like it was imprinted on the twisted spirals of his DNA?
It was just the last voice he had expected to hear so he’d been blindsided.
Luc’s brain was trying to process how this was making him feel.
Or maybe it was scrambling to find an emotional version of a protective shield.
Finding words was nowhere near the top of the list, anyway.
Maybe he needed to decide whether he wanted to say anything at all first.
But then he heard the sound of a tiny catch in a new breath Sophie was taking in and he knew instantly that this wasn’t easy for her. She was being brave and, out of nowhere, he knew how he was feeling, which was as unexpected as hearing her voice had been.
He was feeling proud of her.
They were – presumably – in different countries. So why did it feel as if they were both leaning on each side of no more than a closed door? As if they had their foreheads pressed to the thin barrier, rather than their backs?
It was Sophie who broke the silence.
‘Could we talk?’