The first result that comes up is Roundthehouses.co.uk, which declares itself the UK’s leading property website. I click on it, thinking that obviously the Roundthehouses people subscribe to Kit’s way of thinking rather than mine: they have no worries about bankruptcy-induced humiliation.
The home page loads: exterior shots of houses for sale beneath a dark red border filled in with lots of tiny pictures of magnifying glasses, each with a disembodied pair of eyes inside it. The eyes look eerie, alien, and make me think of people hiding in the darkness, spying on one another.
Isn’t that exactly what you’re doing?
I type ‘Cambridge’ into the location box, and click on the ‘For Sale’ button. Another screen comes up, offering me more choices. I work my way through them impatiently – search radius: this area only; property type: houses; number of bedrooms: any; price range: any; added to site . . . When would 11 Bentley Grove have been added? I click on ‘last 7 days’. The ‘For Sale’ board I saw in the front garden today – or yesterday, since it’s now quarter past one in the morning – wasn’t there a week ago.
I click on ‘Find properties’, tapping my bare feet on the floor, and close my eyes for a second. When I open them, there are houses on the screen: one on Chaucer Road for 4 million pounds, one on Newton Road for 2.3 million. I know both streets – they’re near Bentley Grove, off Trumpington Road. I’ve seen them, on my many trips to Cambridge that nobody knows about.
11 Bentley Grove is the third house on the list. It’s on for 1.2 million pounds. I’m surprised it’s so expensive. It’s big enough, but nothing spectacular. Obviously that part of Cambridge is regarded as a choice area, though it’s always looked fairly ordinary to me, and the traffic on Trumpington Road is often waiting to move rather than moving. There’s a Waitrose nearby, an Indian restaurant, a specialist wine shop, a couple of estate agents. And lots of enormous expensive mansions. If the asking prices for all the houses in this part of town are into the millions, that means there must be plenty of people who can afford to pay that much. Who are they? Sir Cliff Richard springs to mind; I’ve no idea why. Who else? People who own football clubs, or have oil wells in their back gardens? Certainly not me and Kit, and we’re doing about as well, professionally, as we could ever hope to do . . .
I shake these thoughts from my mind. You could be asleep now, you lunatic. Instead, you’re sitting hunched over a computer in the dark, feeling inferior to Cliff Richard. Get a grip.
To bring up the full details, I click on the picture of this house I know so well, and yet not at all. I don’t believe anyone in the world has spent as much time staring at the outside of 11 Bentley Grove as I have; I know its façade brick by brick. It’s strange, almost shocking, to see a photograph of it on my computer – in my house, where it doesn’t belong.
Inviting the enemy into your home . . .
There is no enemy, I tell myself firmly. Be practical, get it over with, and go back to bed. Kit has started to snore. Good. I’ve no idea what I’d say if he caught me doing this, how I’d defend my sanity.
The page has loaded. I’m not interested in the big photograph on the left, the one taken from across the road. It’s the inside of the house I need to see. One by one, I click on the little pictures on the right-hand side of the screen to enlarge them. First, a kitchen with wooden worktops, a double Belfast sink, blue-painted unit fronts, a blue-sided wooden-topped island . . .
Kit hates kitchen islands. He thinks they’re ugly and pretentious – an affectation imported from America. The avocado bathroom suites of the future, he calls them. He’d got rid of the one in our kitchen within a fortnight of our moving in, and commissioned a local joiner to make us a big round oak table to take its place.
This kitchen I’m looking at can’t be Kit’s, not with that island in it.
Of course it’s not Kit’s. Kit’s kitchen is downstairs – it also happens to be your kitchen.
I click on a picture of a lounge. I’ve seen 11 Bentley Grove’s lounge before, though only briefly. On