Love, within minutes, the sort that dries your mouth and thumps your chest. A moment of dizzying recognition; this is it. The flushed red of the bricks that late July afternoon as the weak sun lit up the windows - glinting, naked. The smell of warm, wet earth. I remember the chinless Estate Agent, clearing his throat and calling me Mr. Morgan every other sentence, wittering on about the unseasonable amount of rain we were having that year, the proximity of the tube station, the desirability of the neighbourhood. The peppery smell of his perspiration as the key crunched in the lock.
    Inside. ‘A generous hallway,’ he gabbled, ‘very generous.’ The original Edwardian black and white tiles still on the floor, dust motes dancing sluggishly in the stream of light. High ceilings. The pale green flowered wallpaper, peeling like burnt skin, around the cornices - almost perfect, just a few chips. Generous, yes, certainly. A hallway that said, come in, you are expected.
    The sitting room; a prickle down the spine, a sense of homecoming. Original sash windows. Untouched by the curse of double glazing or any other outrages visited on houses by idiots with no taste; blue and green stained glass in the top panes, casting lucent spangles of light on the dusty grey carpet. And again, the height, after years of glowering, hunched modern ceilings in the hell-hole of the Croydon house I‘d shared with Louise. This room towered above me, dark ghost rectangles where paintings had once hung from the picture-rail. Time froze. I could taste this house in my mouth. Then I was aware of the estate agent’s voice, like a gnat whining in my ear.
    ‘Three bedrooms in all, one in the attic, one bathroom, two receptions, kitchen-breakfast room. The rest of the house boasts a wealth of original features, Mr. Morgan, very unusual to find anything this untouched. I think you’ll particularly like the attic bedroom -’
    The door creaked as we entered; faded blue cabbage rose wallpaper, a boarded-up fireplace, a single bedside table standing forlornly against a wall, like a shy woman at a party. A room aching for solid oak furniture, a huge cast-iron bed.
    My balls tightened. ‘I’ll take it,’ I told him. ‘The asking price. There’s no chain this end, is there? It’s vacant possession?’
    His tongue shot over his top lip, beaded with perspiration. ‘Absolutely, yes, absolutely. The owner’s son wants a quick sale. You said - am I correct in believing this will be a cash purchase -’
    ‘Quite.’ I wasn’t going to go into details of my good fortune; the money I’d inherited from my parents’ estate, the profit from the sale of the marital ‘home’ - uplifting even after Louise’s slime-bag lawyer had had his fun. I walked into the bathroom , with its faint suggestion of carbolic soap and TCP, its huge bath with a yellow stain down the centre, the sides speckled with rust. He scuttled after me, like a bright-eyed cockroach.
    ‘And I’m not wasting time with a survey, so that should speed things up a bit,’ I told him. ‘Surveyors are a waste of time and money. I’ll be renovating the house myself.’
    Outside, the sun was stronger, bathing the pavements in light. Jestico Street, SW18, number six. Waiting, waiting, for the right man, for the loving touch it deserved.

Within two months, possession. I took two weeks off work, and told the agency I didn’t want to be disturbed, except in emergencies. My boss was po-faced about me taking time off in the middle of a major campaign, but they owed me, after all the hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime I’d put in over the years, writing their putrid copy for peoplecarriers or holidays or whatever else they wanted to kid the public into believing it wanted. Since the divorce things had been awkward; my colleagues, who I’d once thought of as friends, (even Nina, who I’d recruited), fell silent when I walked into the bar after work, where they’d all be drinking, slagging off clients, secure in their own little fantasy bubble.
    I collected the key from the Estate Agent and stood in my hallway, breathing the house in.
    The removals van arrived in driving rain; a stiff, needling wind whipped through the hallway as the men carried my few bits of furniture, paintings, books, and stored them in the dining room. I wanted the rest of the house to be empty, uncluttered. There’d be no Austrian blinds, like giant frilly knickers, (the sort Louise favoured) at the windows; no detritus colonizing the kitchen table. No Forest Pine air-freshener would assault my nose and throat. The door banged shut. I smiled to myself as I rubbed my thumb along the top of a cast iron fireplace, breathing in a faint smell of mothballs. Apart from a few shrivelled wasps on window-sills, I was completely alone.
    I drove to Homebase and spent a small fortune; placing each carefully-planned item in my trolley gave me a visceral thrill. I spent the first day up a ladder, steaming wallpaper off the sitting room walls. I scraped the back of the paper off, sticky as chewing gum. Radio Three crackled from my small transistor radio. The wind and rain slapped against the windows. I felt absurdly calm and happy in that echoing room, cut off from computers, voices, surreptitious glances, a peace that had evaded me for years. Surrounded by steam, by long peels of paper, a smell of damp plaster in my nostrils, I thought to myself, this is it. This is what I’ve wanted all along. An old house, solid, unpretentious, in need of love and attention to fulfil its true potential. This is real, physical work, this is what matters. 
    By the time it was dark I’d got all of the paper off, and the walls looked white as bone in the harsh electric light. I ate prepacked sandwiches and swilled them down with most of a bottle of Merlot.
    I curled on my mattress in the un-curtained dining room, tired as a dog. I slept deeply, dreaming of nothing but acres of stripped walls stretching into infinity. The first time in weeks Louise hadn’t infected my dreams. In the morning I woke to the a mild breeze in the trees outside, and weak sunlight on my face.

The next week, the house yielded fresh delights. I found pristine parquet flooring under torn green carpet in the dining room. I fed it linseed oil, so that it glowed like dark skin. I ripped hardboard from fireplaces and discovered the original marble, blue-veined as old hands, and original Delft fireplace tiles, white and blue as icebergs. I’d work from early in the morning until late at night, waking with the sun on my face and the taste of last night’s wine souring my tongue. The telephone rang at the same time each evening, just after six; cheap-rate. On the seventh evening, I answered it.
    ‘Simon? About time. Are you O.K?’
My raw knuckles closed in a fist. ‘I’ve been busy, Louise. It’s an old place, it needs a lot of work. Who gave you this number?’
    ‘Nina. Don’t be angry with her, I told her I was ill. Gallstones.’
    ‘And you’re not, I take it?’
    ‘No. I’m fine. So. How’s life?’ I could hear her voice shaking slightly. I closed my eyes. ’How’s the house? What’s it like?’
    As though she cared. A house to her was a box, somewhere to live, somewhere to be cleaned and paid for and furnished like every other box.
    ‘It’s just an Edwardian house with original features and draughty, dusty rooms. It’s cold and inconvenient and full of character; there’s no microwave, no telly, no double-glazing. You’d hate it.’
    ‘Sounds like a lot of work.’
    ‘It’s everything I ever wanted in a house, actually. It’s perfect.’
    ‘Good. That’s great. Well. I’ll leave you to it.’
    ‘Right. Yes.’
I could hear her breathing; short, urgent breaths. She’s upset, I thought. It’s getting to her, me being here, me being so happy.
    ‘Simon,‘ she blurted, ‘maybe I could come round one evening, bring some wine, bring you a plant or something -’
    I slammed down the receiver. A plant. Some horrible little cactus, no doubt, some tasteless little succulent, withering in its plastic pot. How fitting.
    I stood in the empty room, my ear humming from her voice, like the first sign of tinnitus.
    By the end of my two weeks off my attic bedroom was ready. The floors stripped, the walls painted a fabulous duck-egg blue. With the blind rolled back, the stars burned bright overhead. I lay on my new cast iron bed, and that night, dreamt I was at sea, being lapped further and further away from land on a soothing current.

Returning to work left me fretful, pining for the smell of fresh paint, wood preserver, plaster-filler. I sat through endless meetings, knowing that the plaster I’d applied to the kitchen ceiling was drying and that the wood for the new shelves was waiting to be primed. I couldn’t wait to get home, imagining the smell of paint stripper or emulsion already itching in my nostrils.
    The weather held out all through October. I woke daily to crisp sunshine and a mild, dry breeze. I’d finished stripping all the wooden floors, dumping the carpets in a skip outside. All the walls were now painted, good authentic colours, blues and crimsons and greens, not a flowered border in sight. Freed from its restrictive layers of paper, carpet and dust, the house breathed in, out, in, out. The telephone no longer rang just after six each night.
    The first Saturday morning in October I woke to a squalling gale. Dirty rain wriggled down the windowpanes, winds bashed the walls and roof, a terracotta pot smashed on the front path. I padded around the house, layered in jumpers, shivering. A damp cold seemed to have pervaded the whole structure of the building. The ancient radiators, never, admittedly, enthusiastic at the best of times, grumbled, and stayed cold.
    Taking in the milk, I noticed the first flakes of paint peeling like eczema from the front door, leaving the greying wood underneath exposed. I made coffee, took a cup upstairs to my attic bedroom, aware for the first time how draughts slipped through the fissured brickwork, spiteful and precise. Then, a scuttling movement underfoot; I could hear the blood banging in my chest as I lay with one ear to the floor. The sound again, a treacherous, tiny scratch, like interference on a telephone line. Then I knew, could visualise them perfectly; under floorboards I’d stripped and polished until they gleamed, mice scuttled like pathogens. Sweating, I went out and bought traps. I placed them all around the house.
    That night, the wildest storm in sixty years. A shrew of a wind screamed down chimneys, thrashed windows and walls, bullying the garden until it was flat and cowed. The wind in old houses has a voice, vituperative, accusing. It seeks you out, freezes you to the bone. Hold on, I prayed.
    A crack; my belly dropped twenty floors. I ran up to the attic. The ceiling sagged like old skin, bulged, began to drip.
    I sold the house to a builder, moved to a serviced flat in Putney, with an entry-phone, magnolia walls and auto-timed heating system. A numb cocoon. Louise came to see me once; we sat opposite each other in the cramped living room. I remember she cried, said how sorry she was things hadn’t worked out for me, and could we still be friends. She left me a cactus in a pink plastic pot.
    I don’t sleep well, and when I do sleep I dream the roof of my old house splits open like a carapace. The black night rushes in, floods all the rooms with the light of dying stars.

Catherine Smith