Chapter Twenty-Seven
JESS
Luke brings the car to a halt in a residential street in Elmers End, a suburb a few miles away from where we live. I peer out the window at the tree-lined pavement and red-brick Victorian houses. ‘This is it?’
Luke pulls the key out of the ignition. ‘This is it.’
My fingers hover on the door latch for a second or two before I grab it firmly, pull it, and step out of the car. When Luke said he was taking the day off for our anniversary, this was not what I was expecting.
I follow him a short distance down the road to where a ‘For Sale’ sign stands, screwed into the gate post of a slightly raggedy-looking semi-detached.
As far as I remember, our third anniversary was around the time we started looking seriously for the house we live in now, but this is definitely not our house.
It’s larger, and while ours needed a certain amount of work doing to it, this one looks as if it’s more of a ‘project’.
It’s beautiful, though, with carved white masonry above the windows around the door and beautiful tall sash windows and a high gable roof. We can’t afford this, can we? It looks almost twice the size of our terraced house in our other life.
When I glance at Luke, he’s studying my expression carefully. ‘What do you think?’
I swallow. ‘I think … I think I want to see inside.’
I have so many questions, but I have a sense that my usual method of peppering him with enquiries might not be the right thing to do.
I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because, when I don’t always find the information I’m looking for, Luke starts to get a bit irritated.
Sometimes, I think he thinks I’m being critical.
I’m not. I just like information. I can’t make a decision about things, fully process my thoughts, unless I have all the details, so sometimes I have to dig.
As we walk up to the front door, it opens, and a smart woman in a suit steps out and shakes Luke’s hand, and then mine, vigorously. ‘Great to see you! I’m glad you’re interested in a second viewing.’ She turns her attention on me. ‘Want to take a look around?’ I nod dumbly and follow her inside.
On the ground floor, there are two good-sized reception rooms and a narrow galley kitchen, pretty common with houses of this age that haven’t been renovated by middle-class couples with a healthy budget.
The wallpaper is ugly. The carpets are even uglier.
But the house has good bones, and I’m hoping the plywood nailed to every door and under every staircase railing might be hiding beautiful original features.
Perhaps there’s even a cast-iron fireplace or two behind a more modern-looking surround.
When we’ve done the whole tour, the estate agent excuses herself, allowing us a moment to talk. Luke opens the door to the back garden, and we step out onto a tufted lawn that looks as if it was once cared for but hasn’t been mown in a few good months.
I look up at him, my eyes wide. ‘You want to buy this house?’
He nods. ‘I know this isn’t exactly what we talked about, but hear me out … okay?’
I turn around, shielding my eyes with a flat hand placed against my brow, and study the back of the house.
French doors lead out onto a patio that would be a perfect spot for a kitchen extension.
I don’t even want to think how many years it would take us to save to do that, even if we could afford this place. ‘Okay.’
‘I know we’ve been looking for a place for ourselves, but I think this house could be a great opportunity to boost our deposit fund.’
I frown and look at him. ‘You don’t want us to live here?’
He laughs. ‘No. I mean, yes … I would love to live here. I wish we could afford it, but remember that conversation we had last week?’
Damn. Of course I don’t. But I can’t tell him that, can I? Instead, I ask him to remind me of the details. It’s been a long week. More than he knows!
‘You know how frustrated I’ve been getting with Dad now he’s back at work?
How he absolutely refuses to do anything to pull his building firm into the twenty-first century?
He won’t even get a website, for goodness’ sake!
They’re so much we could do to make Harris & Sons the premier building company in the borough. But he just won’t listen.’
I dig around in my memory, and realize this rant seems familiar.
Luke decided not to go back to his corporate job once his dad’s health improved.
It took him a while to admit it, but he’d never really enjoyed it.
He loved working with family, building something that could be a legacy, possibly for our own children, but the generational differences when it came to running the company caused a lot of friction.
A snippet of a memory flickers across my mind. ‘You want to buy this, do it up and flip it?’
‘The only thing is … ’ He pauses, purses his lips nervously.
‘Is that you want to use our house savings to do it,’ I finish for him.
I remember having discussions about this around this time, although I have no memory of him bringing me to see the house, just that we talked about it.
I’m pretty sure it never happened. I wonder what’s changed to make him bring me this time?
It can’t be a bad thing, can it? He’s sharing more with me, making me more of the decision-making process.
That means my scheme to change the state of my marriage must be working somehow.
‘Yes … ’ He’s perplexed I’ve hit the nail on the head.
‘I know it’ll put our plans to get a place of our own back, hopefully only by a year, but if this works out, we’ll have even more to put down than we have now.
We’ll be able to afford something with a proper garden, possibly even a third bedroom. ’
I stare at the house again. Some of those roof tiles don’t look entirely sound.
‘I know we’ve been saving hard, but how on earth are we going to afford something this big?
’ I know we don’t have the budget for it.
It was a scrape to put down the deposit on our much smaller house in a not-so-nice street.
He’s saved from answering by the estate agent appearing out of the sliding patio doors. She’s chatting to someone behind her, and when she steps out of the way, I realize I know exactly how Luke and I – or maybe just Luke – can afford to buy this house.
‘Hey, you!’ the woman says, smiling brightly at Luke, and then adds, just as brightly, ‘Hi, Jess!’
‘Elena!’ I reply, smiling back.
‘What do you think?’ Elena asks, turning to take in the house. ‘I think it could be a wonderful first project.’
I know. It would. But I also know the first time Luke brought this up, I wasn’t ready to risk the money we’d been saving on something that might not work out. The thought of it still makes me nervous. ‘I think it could be perfect,’ I reply.
Both of them grin at me and then Elena turns to Luke. ‘I had an idea about the area under the stairs,’ she says, walking back in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Let me show you what I’m thinking about.’
I trail back inside the house behind her and Luke, where she proposes putting a series of hidden drawers and cupboards to make the under-stairs storage much more workable.
They bounce ideas of each other, and even the estate agent gets excited and chips in.
I know as much about joinery as I do piloting spacecraft, so I stand in the corner of the hallway and try to look encouraging but end up wandering off to have another look at the front room when the discussion drags on.
I want to check if the leaded lights in the top of the bay window are reproduction.
They turn out to be original, with brightly coloured Art Nouveau-inspired shapes, but two out of seven are missing, and the window frames are rotten as anything.
While I’ve got a moment, I pull out my phone and open my banking app.
I quickly scroll through the list of pages and shoot twenty pounds off to my mother.
Technically, after a couple of loans have remained unpaid for more than a year, we are not lending her any more money, but she phoned me up this morning in tears, really struggling.
She didn’t have any cash for groceries. I can’t let her starve, can I, even if Luke says there are other kinds of support we can give her, that she ought to be standing on her own two feet?
As I head back towards the hallway, where the others are still talking, I hear the estate agent, Gillian, saying, ‘Well, I think this is a great starter home for a young couple like yourselves, and you seem to be brimming with ideas on how to do it up!’
There’s awkward laughter from Luke and Elena as I appear around the living room door. Luke slings an arm around my shoulder and kisses the side of my head. ‘Actually, this is my wife.’
‘Oh, God. I’m so sorry!’ Gillian says, looking a little flustered. ‘For some reason I … ’ She smiles apologetically at me. ‘I thought Luke said he was bringing his sister along to look.’
‘Well, she does want to come and have a nose,’ Luke says, laughing, ‘but this isn’t her.’ He laces his fingers in mine, and I stand there, trying not to look bothered about what I just overheard.
Because I am. Bothered.
I can see why Gillian thought Elena and Luke were a couple. I can also see how easy a mistake it was to make. They make an incredible team.