A Desirable Residence - By Madeleine Wickham Page 0,3

A sudden vision of a smiling estate agent popped into his mind. Yes, Mrs Chambers, I was going to phone you today. We had an offer on the house yesterday. The buyers would like to complete as quickly as possible. Some chance. As far as he was aware, nobody had even deigned to look round the house in recent weeks. Let alone put in an offer. No one was interested. It was going to remain unsold. Mortgaged and unsold. The thought sent a small shiver of panic up Jonathan’s spine.

They had only been given such a large mortgage to buy this tutorial college on the basis that their house would be sold within months; that they would soon be able to pay off one mortgage completely. But instead of that, they now had two mortgages. The size of their total borrowing was horribly huge. Sometimes Jonathan could hardly bear to look at their mortgage statements; at the monthly repayments which seemed to loom so large on the horizon of their monthly budget, and yet eat so little into the outstanding debt.

It had never entered his mind, at the start of all this, that they might get to the stage where they had bought the college but not managed to sell their house. They had always taken the sale of the house for granted; had even worried that it would sell too soon, before they were ready to move out. They’d put it on the market as soon as they’d decided to have a go at buying the tutorial college; and an offer had come along within weeks, from a young couple with a toddler and a baby on the way. A good offer; enough to cover the mortgage with some over. But they’d hesitated. At that stage they weren’t certain whether they’d be able to raise enough money to buy the college. Was it wise to sell the house prematurely? Jonathan wasn’t sure what to do; Liz thought they should wait until their plans were firmer. So Jonathan stalled the buyers for a week while they thought about it. And during that week, the young couple found another house.

In hindsight, of course, they should have grabbed the offer while they had it. But how could they have known? thought Jonathan. How could they have predicted the dearth of interest in their house that had followed? He tried to be philosophical about their predicament. ‘The house will sell eventually,’ he often said to Liz, trying to convince himself as much as her. ‘It will. We only need one person interested. Not twenty. Only one.’

‘We only need one, and he’s been unavoidably detained,’ he once joked, trying to jolly things up. But Liz wasn’t interested in jokes any more. For her, the sale of the house seemed, in the last few months, to have taken on a new significance. It wasn’t simply the money. In her mind, it almost seemed a yardstick; a sign that they would succeed. It was she who had insisted, as the new autumn term approached, that they should move out of the house and into the tutorial college, as they had always planned. She was almost superstitious about it. ‘If we don’t move now, we’ll be admitting defeat,’ she’d wailed, when Jonathan said that in his opinion it was no bad thing that they had a bit longer in the house, just while they got used to running a business. ‘We’ve got to stick to the plan. We’ve got to.’ Even though, as Jonathan pointed out several times, the plan was based on the assumption that by now, their house would be sold. And even though Liz loved the house more than any of them.

There was a streak of fatalism in Liz which Jonathan found, on occasion, rather alarming. But experience had taught him not to argue with it. So they had moved out of their house and into the little flat above the college, and left the house empty, waiting to be sold. Liz had been, during the days since the move, almost maniacally cheerful, as if to prove to herself and everybody else that they’d done the right thing; Jonathan already dreaded the tumble in her spirits, which would surely come.

For himself, Jonathan really didn’t know whether they’d done the right thing or not. They’d both given up steady teaching jobs, a comfortable life and a secure future, to take on a business which, while not exactly declining, had certainly seen better days. If Liz