Dunoon Gardens (2)

Almost three months after we first visited Dunoon Gardens we found ourselves back again.

Several properties in that exclusive enclave along Devonshire Road had become available in the interim as though people had heard what others had got and thought they’d quite fancied a bit of it too, but for various reasons none had been right for us.  As an end of terrace this one was a little bit bigger with two reception rooms and two bedrooms all on the ground floor.

I knew almost as soon as we walked through the door that my girlfriend loved it.  She’d liked the other one much more than I had and this place had the same prettily maintained and restored features bathed in light that shone through its cornered windows.  The second reception room was comfortably big enough to serve as a study cum dining room, much like we already had, thus obliterating my previous reservations - even though the kitchen was still pokey.  It was full of neatly painted floorboards and cute iron fireplaces, picture rails and attractively ornate ceiling roses.  The corridor that ran the width of the flat, with French windows to the garden on one side, made it seem deceptively large.  The bedrooms too were both of a reasonable size, although with the possible drawback of being at the front of building and therefore noisy.

‘I’m not sure I can live somewhere with a bidet,’ I closed the bathroom door and thought of yet further betrayals to my battered and bruised principles.

 ‘It’ll be easy to take it out,’ she countered instantly.

I knew she wanted it and it was reasonably priced.  It was the first place we’d seen that actually seemed a fair deal.  I was short on objections and a vague feeling of unease about living on Devonshire Road didn’t cut it.  It wasn’t sufficient an argument.

With reluctance I agreed to put an offer in, if only to keep ourselves in the running while I convinced myself it would all be okay.

After some debate we decided to offer the asking price in.  Given my hesitations this was a high risk strategy, but my girlfriend was convinced.  She wanted to live there and despite her tendency to seek money off at every opportunity it felt like a tactic which might outflank the horde we knew had been scheduled to see it after us.

Unsurprisingly, pretty flats with lots of natural light are desirable.  We don’t have some unusual fetish here and so when we rang the agent it was clear we weren’t the only ones interested, but, crucially for once, we were first.

‘If someone comes in higher, I’ll come back to you out of courtesy,‘ she said, which seemed surprisingly considerate of her if you believe we were the only ones to receive such treatment.

The phone rang some thirty minutes or so later.

It appeared that others had put in higher bids than ours.  What was our absolute best offer, she wanted to know.  We were reluctant to pay significantly more.  While it was fairly priced that didn’t mean we were prepared to make an unfair offer.  It was, after all, only a flat in zone three.  In the end we settled on an extra ten thousand plus change.  We assumed that the alleged better offers would be people who had the same plan as us, but had added a couple of extra grand just to be on the safe side, so we hoped this would be sufficient to draw us ahead of the pack.

The rest of the day we were on edge.  We constantly checked our phones and harassed the agent for the vendor’s decision.  The end of business came and we had no answer.  Saturday night was purgatory in a Notting Hill bar unable to concentrate on what people were saying.  Sunday was agony at home unable to talk about anything else.  Somewhere amongst all the throbbing tension my unsubstantiated dislike of the area was overpowered by my innate will to win at any costs - and for the whole thing to be over.  I wanted to spend my time thinking about other things; I wanted to feel as though I could get on with my life.

1963:  The jilting music drifted downstairs through the ceiling accompanied by the steady thud of Oliver’s boot heel on the wood floors.

Esme sighed and put the kettle on; there seemed to be little else for it.  She already knew that once Oliver started it would be at least an hour before he stopped.  She might as well try to drown the noise out.  “Boogie-woogie” he’d called it.  Rock and roll the paper had said, the craze sweeping the country.  Gangs of young thugs fighting at the seaside like there was nothing better to do, like the whole nation was on the edge of the abyss.

Not that you’d know it in Forest Hill.

 Oliver played the guitar and sang. He had a rich baritone of a voice that crooned through the fabric of the house.  When he sang it was as though a warm pulse escaped from the brick work and danced amongst the lilting melody.  Downstairs Esme couldn’t hear the words, just the tone which she thought was probably for the best.

‘About nothing other than sex,’ she tutted as the water in the kettle crept towards boiling.  ‘I am quite sure.’

Oliver had moved in just over six months before after poor old Bert Foster finally moved on.  He’d never been the same after Mary had died.  Such a cheery couple, he’d retreated into himself, barely able to pass the time of day with Esme, his neighbour of forty years.  Just a grunt and the lighting of a cigarette whenever they met on the front step, as though to keep his lips too busy to talk. 

Esme had been very fond of the Fosters, but those final couple of years hadn’t been the same.  She’d been looking forward to someone else moving into the flat upstairs.  A young family, maybe.  Oh, the sound of little ones on a sunny afternoon would have been so nice.  Oliver and Claudia hadn’t quite what she’d been hoping for.  She wasn’t even sure if they were married.

She’d asked them, once, where they came from.

‘Birmingham,’ Oliver had laughed, but that hadn’t been what she’d meant.

It was a funny relationship, so, well, modern Esme grudgingly conceded as she poured hot water into the pot.  Claudia out all day, working at that accountancy office in Lewisham.  Oliver kept at home and then off in the evenings to play his music. 

‘I need to practice,’ he’d said many times, ‘but you just let me know if it bothers you, y’hear Miss E?’

He was a nice young man, she thought with some hesitation as the dark brown tea slipped into the milk.  They both were.  A nice couple, ever so friendly, ever so helpful.

Esme perched a garibaldi biscuit on her saucer and tottered into the living room.

He’d fixed her leaking tap and the cleared the waste from her dead-heading.  Without be asked he kept doing the things Bert had done, the things she’d never had a man to do for her.  He’d given short shift to the tramp hanging around too.  Told him, in no uncertain terms, to clear off and to stop bothering elderly ladies.  She’d had to tell him that it was only Mister Hutchinson.  Everyone knew Mister Hutchinson.  He didn’t mean any harm.  He just wasn’t right in head anymore. 

‘He shouldn’t be lurking in the dark like that.  It ain’t right.’

Yes, Oliver meant well even if he sometimes raced away with asking.  She couldn’t equate the smiling, charming, joyful man with what people said.  Certainly he wasn’t stealing anyone’s job.  She couldn’t quite believe he was one of them. 

‘One of the young,’ she muttered and crunched her biscuit.

‘The future, Miss E.  You want to watch out for it ‘cos it’s coming.’

She supposed it was.  Eventually, it comes to us all.  

Two years previously Esme would have said she wasn’t sure she liked the idea of the future.  She never had liked change.  It had taken her almost a year to change the curtains after it became apparent the pollen stains were never going to come out and, in the end, she’d bought some exactly the same after all.  Since Oliver had moved in upstairs, the future didn’t seem quite as bad as some said it would be, but she would be grateful if it were just a bit quieter.   

Late on Monday the agent finally came back to us.

We had, once again, failed.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ she sighed.  ‘The market’s just gone crazy.  At any other time that flat would have been yours.’ 

Which, to be honest, wasn’t much comfort, but I guess she was trying.

There had, it turned out, been two other offers.  One was almost fifty grand over the asking price, clearly made by someone as hyped up and stressed out as we were but with a less concrete connection to reality.  The agent, apparently, advised the vendor not to accept that offer despite it being the largest because she felt the buyers might fail to get a mortgage.  Instead, it went to a cash buyer who offered somewhere between ours and insanity.  Someone who was moving in from New York who had a relative living on the same road.  They just wanted it more badly that we did.

We were both deflated.  It took a couple of days for a sense of relief to creep into my head, but in that immediate moment I felt as though someone had dragged me into an alley, kicked me in the head for a few minutes and stolen my hope.  I’d totally lost enthusiasm for the whole endeavour and was only persevering out of a sense of not wanting to have wasted our time.

In a curious postscript that same afternoon we had a call from another agent saying that somewhere had come back onto the market after their finance had fallen through.  It was over towards Nunhead and we’d looked at it on Rightmove before, but had dismissed it for a variety of reasons.  It felt as though we were scrabbling around in other people’s scraps, but also that it was where we deserved to be, desperately lunging for things no-one else wanted. 

In a pathetic scramble we dashed off final bits of work, closed our computers down, slipped unnoticed out the office and rushed to go and see it.  As I powered over Waterloo Bridge cursing the heaviness of my bike I got a call from my girlfriend.  Someone else had, in the space of ninety minutes, beaten us to it and a new offer had been accepted on the property.

‘It seems,’ I lamented later that evening, ‘that the only way to buy a house is to be unemployed, permanently plugged into Rightmpove and sitting on a massive wodge of cash.  Who are these people?’

There were nastier words and tears of frustration and disappointment as sleep refused to come, but there was one more option.  One more place we hadn’t fully considered yet.