The Girl Before

So why wasn’t it locked? I say nervously, hanging back.

The agent smirks. It was, he goes. There’s a digital key on my smartphone. One app controls everything. All I have to do is switch it from Unoccupied to Occupied. After that, it’s all automatic—the house’s sensors pick up the code and let me in. If I wear a digital bracelet, I don’t even need the phone.

You are kidding me, Simon says, awestruck, staring at the door. I almost laugh out loud at his reaction. For Simon, who loves his gadgets, the idea of a house you can control from your phone is like all his best birthday presents rolled into one.

I step into a tiny hall, barely larger than a cupboard. It’s too small to stand in comfortably once the agent has followed me, so without waiting to be asked I go on through.

This time it’s me who says, Wow. It really is spectacular. Huge windows, looking onto a tiny garden and a high stone wall, flood the inside with light. It isn’t big, but it feels spacious. The walls and floors are all made of the same pale stone. Notches running along the base of each wall give the impression they’re floating in the air. And it’s empty. Not unfurnished—I can see a stone table in a room to one side, some designery-looking, very cool dining chairs, a long, low sofa in a heavy cream fabric—but there’s nothing else, nothing for the eye to catch on to. No doors, no cupboards, no pictures, no window frames, no electric sockets that I can see, no light fittings or—I look around, perplexed—even light switches. And, although it doesn’t feel abandoned or unlived in, there’s absolutely no clutter.

Wow, I say again. My voice has an odd, muffled quality. I realize I can’t hear anything from the street outside. The ever-present London background noise of traffic and scaffolding riggers and car alarms has gone.

Most people say that, the agent agrees. Sorry to be a pain, but the landlord insists we remove our shoes. Would you…?

He bends down to unlace his own flashy footwear. We follow suit. And then, as if the stark, bare emptiness of the house has sucked all his patter out of him, he simply pads about in his socks, apparently as dumbstruck as we are, while we look around.

NOW: JANE

“It’s beautiful,” I say. Inside, the house is as sleek and perfect as an art gallery. “Just beautiful.”

“Isn’t it?” Camilla agrees. She cranes her neck to look up at the bare walls, made of some expensive cream-colored stone, that soar into the void of the roof. The upper floor is reached by the most crazily minimalist staircase I’ve ever seen. It’s like something hewn into a cliff face: floating steps of open, unpolished stone, with no handrail or visible means of support. “No matter how often I come here, it always takes my breath away. The last time was with a group of architecture students—that’s one of the conditions, by the way: You have to open it for visits every six months. But they’re always very respectful. It’s not like owning a stately home and having tourists drop chewing gum on your carpets.”

“Who lives here now?”

“No one. It’s been empty almost a year.”

I look across at the next room, if room is the right word for a free-flowing space that doesn’t actually have a doorway, let alone a door. On a long stone table is a bowl of tulips, their blood-red blooms a shocking dash of color against all that pale stone. “So where did the flowers come from?” I go and touch the table. No dust. “And who keeps it so clean?”

“A cleaner comes every week from a specialist firm. That’s another condition—you have to keep them on. They do the garden too.”

I walk over to the window, which reaches right to the floor. Garden is also a bit of a misnomer. It’s a yard, really; an enclosed space about twenty feet by fifteen, paved with the same stone as the floor I’m standing on. A small oblong of grass, eerily precise and trimmed as short as a bowling green, butts up against the far wall. There are no flowers. In fact, apart from that tiny patch of grass, there’s nothing living, no color of any kind. A few small circles of gray gravel are the only other feature.

Turning back to the interior, it occurs to me that the whole place just needs some color, some softness. A few rugs, some humanizing touches, and it would be really beautiful, like something out of a style magazine. I feel, for the first time in ages, a small flutter of excitement. Has my luck finally changed?

“Well, I suppose that’s only reasonable,” I say. “Is that all?”

Camilla gives a hesitant smile. “When I say one of the conditions, I mean one of the more straightforward ones. Do you know what a restrictive covenant is?”