By Julie Myerson, FT.com site
Published: Sep 22, 2006
Houses are like people. You can fall in love with them - wham! - at first sight. But will it last? So much hope, so many dreams, are pinned on that first glimpse, that first divining of who and what they might be, how it might feel to live in them, how they might just alter you for ever.
The first time I saw our house in Clapham, south London - a warm May evening in 1988 - I was newly pregnant, slowly filling up with our first baby. The house, on the other hand, had stood empty for a year - unbought, unloved, waiting for someone (me?) to see it for what it was: ideal, adorable.
Actually, the conditions that evening were ideal too - perfectly contrived for romance. I saw it alone that first time, without any companion to interrupt my gaze. The rooms were lofty and bare, sunshine streamed in through dusty windows, the scent of lilac was overpowering, birds called on the lawn.
And the estate agent even had the tact to leave us alone together, so I wandered in dreamy silence over its wooden boards, hesitated on the sunlit stair, fingered the curve of the banister. I leaned against the back door, imagining it was mine. And as I moved from room to room the house seemed to relax and my heart turned over. I didn't know what I felt. Recognition? Or hunger? All I knew was that this house wanted me and I wanted this house. I could think of nothing else until our offer was accepted, the mortgage sorted out. And so our affair began.
I'll never forget our first night together. We drank warm champagne and ate an Indian takeaway among the packing cases, the house growing more solid around us by the minute. For a long time afterwards the grey lacquer coffee table (the only smart thing we owned back then) had a bright saffron stain where sauce was spilled. But it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. I was in love. Every breath I took in that house was a good one, every night of sleep perfect. I remember that summer as an extended holiday: good weather, long days, warm nights, a shiny new life unfurling.
Our relationship was long and happy. The house and I stayed together as I left my 20s and grew into my 30s, then my 40s. Seventeen years, three babies born, half a dozen books written, a lot of life lived. So when I woke up one winter morning and realised it was time to move on, I felt uneasy.
It wasn't that I didn't still care for the house - but something had changed. I'd fallen out of love with it, or with the idea of it. It was a hard thing to face but our relationship was static, tired, going nowhere.
"It's not you, " I told the house as I paced its familiar creaky floors and realised just how much the view of the houses opposite suffocated me. "It's me. I need something else, something different. "
But how do you tell a house it's over? It would have been too cruel to say I needed more space, since the poor house - extended and loft-converted to within an inch of its life - had provided as much of that as it possibly could. But it was true that we badly needed to stop sharing a bathroom with our teenage children.
Getting the estate agent round felt treacherous. As he muttered about each ceiling crack, each damp stain, each crumbling windowsill, I wanted to put my hands on those warm plaster walls, press my cheek on those battered pine doors and tell him to forget it. It was what we'd been through together that counted. If the house was slowly falling apart then some days, frankly, so was I.
The details the agent put together made the house look bright, vivid and new. Tarted up. Embarrassing. Already it looked like someone else's house. The day we left, after all the furniture and family and life had been emptied out, I walked around one last time and was shocked to find that without us in it, without the chaotic detail of our lives, it was a quite different space. Or it was just a space. Maybe we had little in common after all, the house and I.
I found our new house on the internet. (Well, times change.) The picture didn't do it justice - dark and blurry, straight out of The Amityville Horror. But the description - old rectory, enormous garden, central London - made my heart zing. We had to meet. Two days later, on a hot August afternoon, I stood outside waiting for the estate agent and phoned my husband. "It's perfect, " I told him, "I love it. I want it. I definitely want to live here. "
He asked if I'd been inside yet. I told him I hadn't but I'd looked through the letterbox, peeped through the hedge.
"The windows, " I told him, "are so elegant. And there are shutters, would you believe? And there's an amazing tree in the garden whose trunk has to be about 6ft wide. "
My husband laughed. "Okay, " he said. "We'd better buy it. "
That was a year ago. I live here now. We live here. It's us and the house. I don't know how long it will last - how can I? - but just like last time, just like every time, right now it feels like for ever. It feels like home.
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