Property by Lionel Shriver

Author:Lionel Shriver [Lionel Shriver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Repossession

ON FIRST VIEWING the two-story semidetached on Lansing Terrace, Helen Rutledge dismissed outright the absurd impression that she was not welcome here. She was a sensible young woman—all right, no longer that young—who routinely privileged the should over the was. This should be the perfect house for her; ergo, it was. Three bedrooms, for herself, a study (perhaps in time a nursery?), and guests: tick. Not one of those decrepit Georgian headaches whose renovations were hog-tied by preservation orders, the structure was at least postwar: tick. Granted, the nondescript semi of yellow brick was located in deep South London, but any property whose purchase someone in Helen’s income bracket could swing was bound to involve a hefty commute to a job in NW1. Indeed, that was the clincher: the house was a steal. Tick, tick, tick!

As for whether she harbored any reservations about 21 Lansing Terrace having been repossessed, the answer was certainly not. A tax accountant, Helen held rules in high esteem. She had no sympathy for people who didn’t exert control over their circumstances—who allowed their lives to go higgledy-piggledy and so created messes for responsible citizenry to clean up. For Helen, the prospect of being unable to pay any bill slipped through her letter box was mortifying. If the previous owner had purchased a property beyond his or her means, such culpable foolhardiness ought rightly to be punished, and that’s all there was to it.

Given the paltry asking price—or paltry in London terms—she was surprised to face no competition, and the estate agent acting for the bank accepted her offer with a hastiness that more seasoned house hunters might have found alarming. But as a first-time buyer, Helen wasn’t about to look a gift house in the mouth. She would continue to rent her flat in Dulwich for a month after the closing in order to do a spot of spiffing up. The persistent unpleasantness that imbued the interior—nothing whose source you could quite identify, and therefore nothing—could surely be ameliorated with a few licks of paint.

Handy for her gender and generation, Helen spent her first Saturday as a homeowner covering the sitting room walls in a vibrant, nervy color that she’d found in the Guardian Weekend’s interior design pages: a dazzling aqua popular for plastic toys. By late afternoon, a beaming second coat had obliterated the somber underlying shade, a light gray with a queasy purple undertone, as if the room had been bruised. Even if the new paint job hadn’t, somehow, settled—the panels of blue-green seemed to float slightly forward of the plasterboard—she’d introduced a splash of vivacity to the ground floor.

She returned the following morning to have a go at the skirting boards. Yet her key simply would not turn the upper lock, though she jiggled it this way and that for a solid ten minutes. Whoosh, up the homeowner’s learning curve: when it was your property, you couldn’t ring the landlord to come and fix it, and Helen fought an urge to cry. The house didn’t like her and didn’t want her inside.

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