The Estate Agent

By Thérèse Down

WHO IS THE ESTATE AGENT?

 

Claire Cavendish is a London Commercial Lawyer whose lifestyle defines success. But when her sixteen-year-old daughter, Annaliese, is diagnosed with osteosarcoma and her husband, Jeremy, says he wants to begin an affair, wealth and success are poor levees against rising tides of grief, panic and the re-surfacing of past trauma as Claire's life breaks down.

 

When Jeremy insists they sell Orchard House, their opulent London home, the stage is set for the advent of Matthew Summers, a young Estate Agent whose own life is profoundly affected by the people who occupy the house he must sell.

 

The Estate Agent is a story of lives in free-fall when there is nothing left to control. However, it is also a story of courage and the extraordinary beauty of life below the surface that will challenge the most cynical to defend their view that death is the nemesis of life and possibility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eLectio Publishing
• Release date: Jan 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781632134455

Thérèse Down

Thérèse Down retired as the Head of English in a Sixth Form College, in 2018, and taught English Literature and Language for almost thirty years, in a range of schools and colleges. Presently, she is a full time PhD student at a Russell Group University, while continuing to work as a novelist. She is the author of Only with Blood and The End of Law.

Book preview

THE ESTATE AGENT

Therese Down

eLectio Publishing

Little Elm, TX

The Estate Agent

By Therese Down

Copyright 2017 by Therese Down. All rights reserved.

Cover Design by eLectio Publishing.

ISBN-13: 978-1-63213-445-5

Published by eLectio Publishing, LLC

Little Elm, Texas

http://www.eLectioPublishing.com

5 4 3 2 1 eLP 21 20 19 18 17

Printed in the United States of America.

The eLectio Publishing creative team is comprised of: Kaitlyn Campbell, Emily Certain, Lori Draft, Court Dudek, Jim Eccles, Sheldon James, and Christine LePorte.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Publisher’s Note

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For Michael

ARRIVALS

"The life of every woman or man—

the heart of it—

is pure and holy joy."

—Silk Road Fortune Cookie

Chapter One

IT WAS THE SORT OF SUMMER everyone remembers. By nine o’clock each morning, it was hot. Fifteen days into July, and the sun’s relentlessness was tiresome. People began to talk about rain with something like nostalgia.

I remember the grass died in the lawn borders of Giles & Fotheringay. It assumed a brownish tinge before expiring convincingly in patches that soon became dust. I thought with annoyance that a very little money and due diligence would have saved it. Grass was scarce enough in Holborn as it was. However, by the time I was behind my desk and at the centre of that day’s maelstrom of correspondence, I forgot the grass I had passed on my way into the office. In any case, it transpired that a plan had been afoot for some time to pave the office frontage, so the demise of the lawns by thirst was fortuitous.

Of the heat and death of grass, perhaps, my unconscious mind conjured an unsubtle flag of pathetic fallacy. I recall so vividly the dream I had that hardened to certainty the impression under which I had been living, that my marriage was dead. I woke one stifling night in mid-July to a terrific thirst and was unable to locate myself in the bedroom I shared with Jeremy. I lay blinking and sweating as hesitant birdsong punctuated the ceaseless hum of North Circular traffic. A whale, huge and blue, had been stranded in a vast bowl of cracked earth, pierced through the middle by an enormous ship’s anchor. It was still alive and making piteous noises of ineffable distress. There was absolutely no hope of its survival or rescue.

I made up my mind to tell Jeremy that I wanted a separation. I never doubted that I wanted a divorce, but it seemed brutal to skip stages in a journey I knew would be less direct for him. He didn’t like itineraries in his home life. His work life was planned to the ‘nth’, he used to say, so at home and on holiday, he insisted we just let things happen. Sometimes, though, surprises are what spoil things.

I only mention the above because it is, obscurely, where this story begins.

When I went back to work, Annaliese was barely five months old. I recall my mother-in-law’s disapproval that I had had the child at all, given that, she accused, I hardly saw her. I employed a nanny and squeezed into the suits I wore before I became pregnant, squeezed my feet into elegant shoes, disciplined my sleep-deprived brain to function in the compartments it had occupied before pregnancy hormones made it fuzzy, and went back to my pursuit of full-equity partnership at Giles & Fotheringay. A nanny agreed to live in for an exorbitant salary. Jeremy said little and smiled accommodatingly.

My commercial case load was expanding nicely in the months leading up to my maternity leave. My assistant at the time was exceptionally capable for an articled clerk; he had a sharp business instinct and a demeanour that oozed naked ambition. He swam effortlessly through the offices, saying all the right things, teeth gleaming. For a short period of time, I could trust him to look after my clients. Beyond that, they might begin to feel they were more his than mine or worse, one of my competitors might bait a line to another law firm, and my assistant would defect, taking one or more of my key clients with him.

Jeremy’s mother visited more often than I would like in those early days. She was determined to plug the wifely and maternal gaps she perceived I left in her son’s and granddaughter’s lives. When we announced the marriage was on hold (Jeremy’s term), Edwina’s I-told-you-so attitude was not tempered by the fact it had lasted seventeen years. My mother-in-law’s conviction that her son had married badly was vindicated.

In any case, Edwina was from another era. I recalled the stories she had confided in me when I was on maternity leave—of feeling abandoned by Jeremy’s father when she herself was a young mother. As baby two then three demanded her attention, and her husband built his tax career abroad, it was, she said, a bit like being a toothpaste tube—the more she lived through scream-filled nights and nappy-punctuated days, the longer she endured alone, weeping softly through the rare, peaceful hours upon which she stumbled, and the less there was of herself. Dreams of taking up singing again, or at least working in a theatre or arts centre of some kind, were pressed from her over time until she was all tiredness and resentment, a slave to clinic appointments, shopping expeditions, bill paying, and housecleaning. David, Jeremy’s father, brought her kimonos and extravagant jewellery from his business trips, but Edwina told me how she would eye them bitterly once alone with them in their bedroom, how the fury welled inside her as she teased her uncut hair into styles and fixed it with hairspray, lined her eyes with kohl, and applied foundation too dark for her pallid skin. A particularly fine red silk kimono was too large—even after the third baby. David was delighted and complimented her on her weight loss, but Edwina had not been able to prevent the tears that sprang spontaneously and ruined her makeup. It wasn’t hard to lose weight when you were depressed, had no time to eat, and barely slept. When Jeremy and I split up, I felt, unaccountably, as though I had betrayed these confidences.

Annaliese was well cared for when I went back to work. Vicky, the nanny, was kind and slow and accommodating. She never complained when I got home late and always put a plate of something in the oven for me. It was like having a wife who expected nothing of me except an allowance and every third weekend off. She visited her parents on those weekends. I don’t recall her mentioning a boyfriend.

Jeremy was an affable father but no less ambitious than I. He is a senior actuary. We met at an annual dinner function put on at the Savoy by the firm for which he had already worked for two years. Giles & Fotheringay contracted out its pension and benefits administration to Mercer Foster and brought in consultants from them when we landed a particularly large client. We handled the dissolution of companies, the transfer of undertakings, asset stripping, acquisitions, and sundry other reorganisational issues. The employment department handled the redundancies or transfer of employment contracts. But the nitty gritty stuff to do with pensions and benefits accrual, rights, and compensation, we left to Mercer Foster.

Jeremy was charming and tall with a lovely smile. Of course, he had hair then—dark blonde and kept short, though at one point, at university, it had been shoulder-length. We got on well, laughed a lot, made a lot of money, and liked travelling. The wedding was hitch-less. Did I love him? Yes, I think so. I’m not sure, really, what that is. Love. I remember I was picked up in a white limousine for that Savoy do. I wore a ridiculously figure-hugging, backless dress of cream crushed silk and wasn’t the least concerned that in bright light it was see through. Someone at the dinner, a woman in her mid-fifties, I guess, leaned across the table and told me I was living proof you could not be too thin or too rich. Zenith is a word that occurs when I think of those days.

I digress. This is Annaliese’s story.

When you hold a thing of exquisite beauty in your hands. its origins are not uppermost in your mind. Your appraisal of its beauty is in the context of reception, coloured in the first instance by the forces that have shaped your perception. Those that gave rise to the object of admiration are secondary. I am not sure it is so with ugliness or depravity.

Annaliese was beautiful. I saw what many others did, though having some role in her production, could not do so without marvelling at the independence of genomic determination. Who knew what ancestral DNA was replicated to sculpt that fine, aquiline nose or those full lips? Neither Jeremy nor I was the artisan in those instances. The eyes—yes. I claim them. Jeremy’s were frank and blue, like those of many Englishmen from conquering lines. Annaliese’s eyes were finely tapered, equine brown. Equine because there is a tabernacle of light in a horse’s eye that denotes permanent alertness. Annaliese had inherited my instinctive unease—one I imagine was prevalent in Neanderthals and is still alight in the eyes of wolves; the unease of things born to survive by wit. So many primitive images to describe a girl of such accomplishment!

She played the piano from an early age and with exceptional skill. Her musicality at least could be traced backward from her father. Jeremy had done modestly well as lead guitar in a sort of rock band in his twenties. They got local radio airplay when he was at university in Leeds. Jeremy’s mother had had a promising career as an opera singer before she married, and her father had been a violinist with the London Philharmonic—which is how he met Jeremy’s maternal grandmother, also an opera singer. Sometimes people commented on the quality of my voice when I sang in the school choir as a child. One Christmas, I got a solo.

We bought the piano when Annaliese’s first music teacher began to marvel at the child’s effortless fluency, the ease with which she picked up sight reading and ran up arpeggios, her small fingers nimble and undaunted by octave spans or tricky fingering. Gifted was the word the teacher used. Her confidence was enough to encourage Jeremy in the parting with thousands of pounds for a brand new Young Chang baby grand in an ebony polish finish. It would last her a lifetime, he reasoned, so would prove a good investment if the music teacher’s prophecies of exceptional accomplishment were only half right. In this, he was correct.

The sales literature boasted that the precise action and spruce keyboard of the baby grand could maximise the responsiveness of the musician’s touch and convey the soul of the pianist. How right it was. When Annaliese sat down to play that instrument, two things of exquisite beauty melded, and the result was sublimity hard to describe. Throughout my daughter’s formative years, I often came home from work exhausted after fourteen or so hours of legal parrying to a world foreign and beguiling. I would pause in the hallway, stopped in my busy thoughts by sounds as entrancing as those which lulled Caliban on his island. And always, Annaliese would look up from her playing, greet me with that lovely smile. How was your day, Mum? Are you exhausted? she would ask, rising from her stool to hug me.

If the piano was a mechanism by which Annaliese communicated the exquisiteness of her soul, her expertise as a horse rider left no one in doubt regarding her mental and physical strength.

We bought her first pony when she was eleven. Snowball was a feisty grey with a storm of dark dappling across his hindquarters. He had a beautiful, slightly dished head. Somewhere in his line was something Arabian though his thirteen-two hands height and tendency to stockiness made it unlikely that exotic genes were recent contributors to his DNA. His spirit was feisty and barely contained by his diminutive frame. In this, Annaliese was a match for him. Her gentle demeanour and easygoing disposition were suborned to a masterly discipline that bypassed fear when she rode. She was undaunted by Snowball’s tossing head or tactics to unseat her. Once, when she was schooling him in the indoor arena of the local riding school, he deliberately and suddenly sidled into a girder in order to crush her outer leg. He bolted a few times; on one occasion, pitching her over a gate when he came to an abrupt halt before it from a flat-out gallop. Quite deliberate. There was even a trip to casualty—a suspected fractured collarbone, I recall. But nothing Snowball could contrive to unnerve Annaliese worked. She remounted and assumed the reins with a firm and determined hand. After a few months, just when Jeremy was making noises about selling the darned animal before he killed our daughter, Snowball suddenly seemed to realise it was in his interest to work with his rider. He began to listen to her voice, constantly flicking his ears as he moved fluidly in whatever direction and at whatever pace his mistress commanded. Another month or so and the martingale we applied to stop him tossing his head and rearing was removed from his bridle.

Soon after Annaliese had outgrown Snowball and he had he been sold on, when her broken heart was on the mend, we bought her Banner. Banner was a fifteen-hands flame red chestnut with a simply glorious action. He seemed to glide rather than pace across ground, his elegant legs extended in a swimming motion, eager to cover distance or exhibit grace. His tail was always high and seemed to signal his joy in movement. Hence his name. Of course, he cost a small fortune, but when I located him in Gloucestershire, Jeremy did his calculations and was, again, accurate in his estimation that Banner would see Annaliese through her teens and into womanhood. Together, they would mature and grow in skill. On Banner, Annaliese became a dedicated and highly skilled horsewoman. Their graduation to dressage was natural.

We bought Orchard House in 2008, in the wake of the global economic crisis that even saw off a couple of Giles & Fotheringay’s most prestigious clients. It was a difficult time. I had to sack one of my assistants. Jeremy’s work, at least, flourished in the uncertainty. Everyone from pensioners to multimillion-dollar conglomerate bosses wanted to know their revised future worth. House prices slumped, even in North London. And so, we picked up a five-bedroom Victorian spread of a house, with more than a hundred and twenty feet of garden, in Oakleigh Park North. We got it for well under the 1.6 million it should have cost. It is beautiful, with its ornately carved balcony, white iron and light veranda, and stately hall. The kitchen is a gleam of marble floor and Harrods steel. We paid almost fifteen hundred pounds for a coffee machine in piano white with a super-fast Aroma + grinder and milk frothing technology. The lawns sweep away from the patio as if rolling in delicious sleep. At the furthest end of the gardens, mature cherry trees console each other in exquisite defiance, the remnants of a private orchard, perhaps once the breeding ground of debutante dreams. In spring, a glorious magnolia tree, at least a hundred years old, casts a net of pink and cream flowers across a central point in the lawn as if announcing to the house that the London high season has arrived.

Annaliese loved Orchard House instantaneously. Her bedroom was magnificent. It is sixteen by sixteen feet, eggshell blue and cream with high ceilings, exquisitely corniced and rosed. The floor, like most of the floors in the house, is solid oak. We spared no expense then, and as time went by, in furnishing and decorating the room. Thankfully, Annaliese was a cheerful and sensible girl so never went through a ‘goth’ stage or wanted to plaster the walls with posters of boy bands. She preferred muted florals and neutral wool rugs. We did, though, have to install picture rails to accommodate her many horse prints, and she found a poster of Johnny Depp in a cowboy hat at Alexandra Palace market, which she really loved. We had it framed and hung above her bed. I rather liked that one myself.

We found a lovely equestrian centre within walking distance of a nearby underground station that Annaliese could get to in about twenty minutes without having to change trains. There we installed Banner. The day we collected him was glorious. We hired a horsebox and driver one sun-bright Saturday in May, a few months after moving into Orchard House. We—Jeremy, Annaliese and myself—all wore casual clothes and made a picnic. Jeremy had wanted to drive the horsebox, but I wouldn’t let him. Thousands of pounds worth of horseflesh and our only daughter in the largest vehicle Jeremy would ever drive. Not likely! We had a Jag that rarely left the garage, and we followed a hired horsebox to Gloucestershire. If we went to see Jeremy’s mother in Kent at weekends, or my family in Oxford, then he drove the Jag. I had an Audi that gleamed on the drive, but I only used it if I needed to go and see clients whose premises lay beyond the farthest flung stations on a tube line. Apart from the trains or black cabs that pushed endlessly through London’s arteries, the only other transport we took were planes to hot places whenever we could grab a week from our manic diaries. We never managed to coincide time off for more than a week after the first five years of marriage. Eventually, Jeremy preferred to stay in Europe because internet connectivity was so unreliable further afield. I had to agree. To compensate Annaliese for the lack of two-week Florida or Belize vacations most of her friends seemed to enjoy, we sent her and Banner on residential equestrian breaks in rural UK locations.

Undaunted by the surly horsebox driver with a broad East London accent, we flashed him to pull over by a field off the A419, somewhere near Marlborough. He watched us, scowling into the wing mirror as we got out of the Jag that day in May 2008. Ducking under barbed wire, then picking our way across a stream, we trespassed into a waving field of hay-grass and found a spot out of the driver’s sight. There, we spread a groundsheet and unpacked our hamper. I had prepared the picnic myself—about which Annaliese and Jeremy had expressed reservations, but they were unfounded. Gentleman’s relish on rye bread for Jeremy, with hard-boiled egg and lots of grapes, accompanied by a crisp pinot grigio, kept cool in an insulated carrier. For Annaliese, ham rolls—she liked the cheap white rolls people use for hotdogs, and she loved mustard. Lashings of it, though Jeremy and I squinted at how eyewatering we imagined it would be in Annaliese quantities. I had not indulged her fully; I used a nice French grain sort, far less piquant. That way, I told her, she might actually taste the very fine hock ham I had bought that morning at a local charcuterie. I chose granary brown bread and a crumbly Cheshire cheese with pickled walnuts. I stole quite of few of Jeremy’s grapes—to his annoyance and Annaliese’s amusement.

It was a lovely time—Jeremy stretched out and smiling. I remember how sparkly his eyes were, but also how the sunlight etched his crows’ feet. The neat beard he was cultivating suited him and distracted a little from the hair loss—which was, I think, the intention. He has very long legs but, out of a suit, lamentable taste in trousers. He was wearing corduroys and leather sandals with beige socks on that day. Why is it that even when we are married to someone, we can’t tackle these things? Sometimes, Jeremy’s inept dress sense irritated me profoundly and was, I am ashamed to say, a passion killer. Maybe it was because I knew how eager he would be to change in order to please me that I never asked him to do it. It was unlikely to work.

Anyhow, we talked excitedly of how lovely it would be to introduce Banner to his posh livery set up at the equestrian centre. Their schooling arenas were top-notch. Both interior and exterior arenas were floodlit and floored with a high-grade rubber crumb and fibre mix, perfect for shock absorbency regardless of equestrian discipline. The instructors were qualified to the highest standards, their horseman/woman-ship proven in the show jumping and dressage arenas of the biggest competitions in the world. Two had been on Olympic teams. Annaliese said she would bring Banner to Orchard House on the tube. I said she’d have to fold him or travel outside peak times.

Fold him? She screwed up her nose and repeated the words in a tone implying my madness.

Yes, like a bicycle, I responded earnestly. Just about the only way you could get a bike on the tube is if it folds or, on some lines, after peak times. A horse takes up even more room.

She rolled her eyes. I was joking, Mum. Then she resumed her playful demeanour. But wouldn’t he love the lawns and the lovely trees? she asked.

Yes, no doubt, rejoined Jeremy, but our gardener wouldn’t thank us for the hoof damage.

He might like the manure, though! parried Annaliese, laughing.

Did they know, I asked, that horse manure was far too acidic and full of weed seeds to be of much use as a fertiliser, unless it was composted first? They both groaned.

That was a thing, I noticed. If Jeremy stated the obvious or fielded one of Annaliese’s silly comments with common sense, she laughed or shrugged good-naturedly. My small print adjuncts, as she called them, seemed to irritate her. A daughter’s relationship with her father is probably easier than that with her