Page 6 of The New House

‘Mr Taft.’

‘MrTaft? Like, our history teacher from school?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why would Taft give this to you?’

‘He didn’tgiveit to me, idiot. I took it.’

‘You took it?’

She thumped down on the bed next to me. ‘I know your mother’s just died, but you need to stop repeating everything I say,’ she said. ‘I took it from his office. Hishomeoffice,’ she added. ‘His stupid dog woke up. I’m surprised he slept through the barking. He must be going deaf.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘He was so mean to you. And he loved that stupid keyring. He was always playing with it in class.’ She shrugged. ‘I thought having it might cheer you up.’

‘You’re crazy, you know that? What if you’d got caught?’

‘I never get caught,’ she said.

I put the keyring down, and kissed her.

It was our first kiss.

And it told us both everything we needed to know.

chapter 04

millie

I’m out on my morning run when I spot theFor Salesign going up outside the Glass House.

The property is a landmark in this part of south-west London, tucked away in the labyrinth of streets between Fulham and Putney. Most of the period housing stock in SW6 has a uniformity to it not found in other parts of London, because it was all built in a single thirty-five-year span when Fulham’s prosperity turned from market gardening to housing after the District Line arrived in 1880. Rows and rows of identical Edwardian and Victorian terraced houses, punctuated now and again by post-war semis built on old bomb sites.

And then there’s the Glass House.

The land sits on the inner right-angle of an L-shaped street, jammed between perpendicular rows of houses like a Trivial Pursuit wedge. A small workman’s cottage used to stand on it, but after it was bombed to rubble in the Second World War, the land was considered too small to redevelop until people started paying three-quarters of a million pounds for a parking space.

The house looks like a glass lantern, with its milky translucent facade and black ironwork. It comprises two cubes, stacked at angles to each other, and has an almost glowing effervescence, thanks to the clear-and-frosted-glass exterior walls. According to the architect who designed it in the Sixties, he drew inspiration from an iconic Modernist glass house in Paris, a 1930s building known as La Maison de Verre.

The main living rooms are in the cube on the upper floor, which is capped by a rooftop garden, while three sprawling bedroom suites are all on the ground level. The inverted layout and walls of glass allow light to cascade into the living spaces, the effect enhanced by internal translucent sliding screens of the type found in traditional Japanese homes.

If the home had been built anywhere else, its asking price would run into eight figures. But the only access to the property is via a right of way less than six feet wide which slices from the street at an angle of forty-five degrees between the two adjacent properties. There’s no parking, of course. There’s no exterior space at all other than the rooftop and a narrow swimming pool – designed for exercise rather than recreation – that takes up the entire rear garden.

The house is smaller than ours in terms of square feet but the use of space is so effective the floorplan looks like a work of art. It’s changed hands just once since it was built. According to land registry records, it’s currently owned by Salome Ltd, a company with two directors, Felix and Stacey Porter. They bought it twelve years ago, just after Ms Porter got her gig on morning television.

I know all of this because I’ve stalked this house for years.

The first time I saw it was when I was out jogging with Peter in his pushchair, making efficient use of my maternity leave. We were living across the river then, in a two-bedroom flat in Wandsworth. At the time, it was all we could afford.

I stopped on the pavement so abruptly Peter almost got whiplash. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to understanding the phrasecoup de foudre.

A stroke of lightning:this is my house. It just didn’t know it yet.

As soon as I got home, I told Tom I’d found the house we were going to grow old in. He knew better than to dismiss it as a fantasy, even though we could barely keep up the payments on the Wandsworth mortgage.

The following weekend, we stood on the pavement outside the home and agreed: the Glass House got a free pass.

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