Vacant Possession

Glenda was surprised, but not (she hated the phrase, but had to admit it was expressive!) gobsmacked when she got the call from Edward the Estate Agent. Somehow his name and his job description just seemed to go together. But she had to admit he’d never given her and her partner Colin any cause for complaint. As a tax inspector’s daughter, she knew she was probably predisposed to give people in the “problematic professions” the benefit of the doubt, but Edward seemed genuinely eager to please but reluctant to push.

     “Glenda, it’s Edward the Estate Agent,” he even referred to himself that way, sometimes. “I wanted to let you know about a property you might be interested in. 

     “Fire away!” she said.

     He duly fired. It was within their price range, and in a pretty little village still within fairly easy reach of the town where they both worked. It needed, Edward said frankly, “A bit of renovation, but not that much to make it a comfortable enough place to live in, and in my opinion avocado bathroom suites are much maligned.” She wouldn’t have been surprised to discover he had one, but was too polite to ask – and too interested. “There’s a bit of subsidence, but let’s be honest, that applies to practically every property round here. I don’t think it should be that much of an issue.” And it was called Crocus Cottage. Of course, in itself that was no reason to buy a property, but it had a ring to it. She couldn’t help wondering ……

     “I’ve only seen it in the summer, so I’m not going to 100% vouch for the crocuses,” Edward said, as if reading her mind, “But it seems like the kind of place that most certainly OUGHT to have crocuses.”

     Glenda warmed even more to the sound of a cottage that looked as if it ought to have crocuses. It was currently empty, and Edward said he could drop the key off so they could look round at their own leisure. Colin was a paramedic, so she didn’t normally make non-urgent phone-calls to him during the working day, but allowed herself an exception. 

     “So it looks like Edward has come up trumps,” he said.

     Glenda agreed, but reminding herself she was supposed to be the cautious one of the two, she pointed out that they hadn’t seen it yet. 

     As luck would have it, the next day was Saturday, and neither of them generally worked on Saturdays, though Glenda covered shifts for others in the post office sometimes, and Colin had to be “on call” in case there was what they euphemistically called a “health event”, meaning some epidemic or accident. They couldn’t predict the latter, but as he put it, there was not so much as a sniff of the former. He added pun unintended, but Glenda knew perfectly well it was completely intended, and groaned, but hoped he’d never change.

    It was a pleasant drive to Crocus Cottage, and though the roads in the area were pretty infamous, it was definitely along one of the better ones – it was wide, and at least there was more road than potholes. As Edward had said, it would be an easy enough commute. The hospital didn’t like their standby paramedics living too far away, for obvious reasons, but it was within the guidelines. 

     Crocus Cottage wasn’t one of those cottages that had a thatched roof and mullioned windows and roses round the door – it was really more of an old fashioned bungalow, though technically it did have an upstairs – there was a dormer window in the eaves, under the roof. Glenda rather liked that roof with the red slates. Given the whitewashed walls (okay, they could do with a thorough cleaning) it reminded her of a toadstool in a children’s tale. Well, almost. 

     “It definitely looks like the kind of place that would have crocuses,” Colin said, and Glenda agreed. Those little beds at the front were made for a springtime colourful carpet.

     The door was a little creaky, but not like a sound effect in a horror film, and nothing a bit of WD 40 wouldn’t fix. On opening it there was a slightly musty smell, but only the kind you’d get in any house that hasn’t been lived in for a while, even if the inhabitants had just gone on an extended holiday. It wasn’t horrible or overpowering.

     “And the doors are a decent height, thank goodness,” Colin said, ruefully. Glenda knew exactly what he meant. His sister and brother in law had bought what was UNDENIABLY a cottage, and it was very quaint and atmospheric, but Colin was a tall man, and said every time he visited it he came away with a headache from impact with the low doors! 

     “So your old nobby’s safe,” she said, affectionately tousling his hair a bit. “Nobby” had been his father’s word for “head”, one of those childhood words that lingered on, and that, as Colin said, you wished your parents would stop using when you were grown-up, until they passed away, and then you longed to hear them. 

     Even impulsive Colin knew buying a house wasn’t like buying a phone or a new sweater; it was something you had to think over, but the more they looked round Crocus Cottage, the more they came to the decision that, despite the avocado bathroom suite and the slight subsidence, it would be a terrible shame to miss out on it now Edward had been so good as to give them the first chance. Well, they presumed he had. They had both noticed there was no For Sale sign, which was, perhaps, a little odd, but not earth-shattering.

     They arranged to meet up with Edward on Monday evening, when the Estate Agents stayed open later. Of course much of the business was conducted over the phone or online, but all three of them still wanted to have a personal chat, face-to-face with coffee as Edward put it, though in fact he was more of a tea-drinker. 

     He went into more detail about Crocus Cottage, and they appreciated his honesty when he said, “I hope it’s not something that bothers you, but it’s only right you know – the previous owner, an old gentleman called Mr Vincent, died in the cottage. He was in his nineties, and it was peacefully in his sleep, but – well ….”

     He broke off. Colin and Glenda exchanged a glance and knew neither of them was too bothered about that. As Glenda said that night, in a property of any age at all, there was always a chance someone had died in it. Colin, as he said quietly, had seen dead bodies in the course of his work, not that often, but he had, and as he said, “Well – not always peacefully in their sleep.” And part of Glenda’s work was dealing with Life Insurance policies, which, okay, wasn’t quite the same. But she’d lived opposite a churchyard when she was a little girl. “And it didn’t give me nightmares!” So they were agreed it wasn’t an issue, and certainly wouldn’t put them off. 

     When there was no chain and a house had vacant possession – the vocabulary of estate agents had become part of Colin and Glenda’s vocabulary – moving into a new house didn’t take that long. They were quite sorry to leave the flat they’d rented for the last couple of years, since they officially declared themselves an item. They’d been happy there, and got on well with their neighbours. But it had only ever been meant to be temporary, and they were looking forward too much to making Crocus Cottage their home to be too sad. 

     They decided they could live with the avocado bathroom suite for a while, and gave their immediate attention to making their lounge cosy and distinctively their own. They’d never had an aversion to second hand furniture, and though they got a new sofa (in a lovely soft maroon shade, and the kind that actually was comfortable and didn’t just look it) but were delighted with the bureau desk they found at a local auction. It had a pull-out wooden slat that could have been made for a computer, though the desk was made long before they were invented, and enough separate compartments to at least give the impression of being organised with the paper work. The top shelf was ideal for ornaments and knick-knacks, and for lighting a scented candle when they felt like making the room more atmospheric.

     Colin was on an evening shift as Glenda sat at the desk, writing a long and chatty email to her old schoolfriend Samantha. She was the only one of her former schoolmates she’d kept in touch with long term, and now they had even more in common as Samantha lived in a country cottage, too, called Crofter’s Cottage. Glenda joked that their teachers always had accused them of copying each other too slavishly, and now she half-joked that they had certainly taken it to extremes with their house names. 

     It goes without saying that Glenda told herself she was imagining things when she had that feeling of someone reading over her shoulder. But she couldn’t quite shake it off, and even when she had looked backwards to assure herself that nobody was there, some of the pleasure of writing to Samantha had evaporated. She saved the draft and decided to return to it later. 

     Had anyone asked Glenda if she believed in ghosts, she would have replied that she had never seen one. She thought most stories of hauntings were rubbish to sell books and make people watch TV shows, but had a vague notion that there was probably more to the world than could be instantly and logically perceived with the senses. Had they asked her if she wanted to live in a house with one, she would have felt equally ambivalent, but probably, on reflection, come down on the side of NOT. In a stately home you visited, or a hotel you spent a weekend in it was another matter, but your own home – well, though not antisocial or inhospitable, Glenda had a certain aversion to people appearing uninvited, and it applied to the dead as much as to the living. 

     Anyway, she told herself, reminding herself that all of this was just hypothetical, old Mr Vincent was hardly likely to be threatening or malicious. He had lived to a ripe old age, died peacefully in his sleep, and according to everyone they’d met, including their neighbour Stella at Byways Bungalow, had been a dear, gentle soul, well-liked by everyone. 

     All the same, she found herself saying to what was, after all, an empty room, “Mr Vincent, it’s good of you to drop in, and Colin and I are very happy in your house, but you rest in peace now!”

     She didn’t tell Colin about her experience. It was hardly worth mentioning. Anyway, he was tired and stressed after a rather traumatic night and could live without her vapid ghost stories.

     She had practically forgotten about it, she told herself, when she saw the man in uniform in the kitchen. And this time she most definitely did see him, and it most definitely wasn’t Mr Vincent. She was no expert on uniforms, but it wasn’t any military one she recognised, though it seemed to half-imitate them. It wasn’t the shade of one of those poor brave lads whose names were on the village war memorial. Not least because – and this was an absurd detail, but a troubling one – she could see a mobile phone protruding from his pocket. He didn’t say anything, but he looked, he looked long and hard, and Glenda didn’t like that look. It was the look of someone who, if they did speak, might well be polite, almost too polite, and even flattering, but would make it plain he was in charge, and anyone who thought or acted otherwise would wish they hadn’t. Sneering. But beyond sneering. Godfrey at work had a tendency to sneer, and he could be a pain in the backside, but there was nothing threatening or, she had to admit, really nasty about him. She wasn’t wholly convinced it was just a ploy to hide his inner insecurity, as their colleague Anne, who always saw the best in people, said, but she never felt threatened or uneasy in a room with him, and could give as good as she got. 

     She wished that little verse about He wasn’t there again today, I wish to God he’d go away hadn’t come unbidden into her mind. When she had read or heard the phrase “I went cold” she had dismissed it as a melodramatic cliché, but now she realised it could happen. Or was it the room that had gone cold? Something, or someone, had come into it, and something had been sucked out of it. 

     I’m scared, Glenda realised. It wasn’t the kind of fear that made her want to scream or bury her head in a cushion, or put on loud music, or run up the road, but it was a fear none of those things would ease. And it was rooted, as much as in the sight of the sneering man in uniform itself, as in the knowledge that things were spoilt now. Crocus Cottage could never be the same. 

     When Colin came in, he said, “Love, what’s the matter?” She dreaded him using the standard phrase “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” because that would have been a kind of confirmation, and yet at the same time she wanted him to use it because then she could burst into tears and the tears could turn to laughter as he hugged her, and the poison would be drawn.

     He didn’t use the phrase, and she knew that if he had, the poison wouldn’t have been drawn.

     Did she want Colin to see the man in uniform or not? She didn’t know, but he never did. He didn’t even seem to sense any atmosphere. It’s almost as if we’re living in different worlds now, she thought, as she peeled the potatoes. There wasn’t any truth in that business about mundane and repetitive tasks helping, either.

     She knew he was there. She also knew where she had seen that uniform, or at any rate, something not entirely dissimilar – it was a bit like the ones that the security staff who collected and delivered the cash from the post office wore. But they were all lovely, and none of them had the means, even if they’d had the inclination, of getting into Crocus Cottage.

     That was the first time she heard him speak. “This is my home,” she said. “You know that.”

     “Go away!” she exclaimed, and she turned to see he had, but of course, he hadn’t. She had, trying desperately to be casual, asked the other villagers about the history of Crocus Cottage. Mr Vincent had lived in it for nigh on 30 years, and his wife Maureen, too, until she passed away six years ago. They had two daughters, one of them lived in London and one in Canada. Before that – well, hardly anyone could actually remember it from their own experience, but it had been a family called the Montagues, and he’d been a vet. 

     In days gone by, folk might have said that Glenda was being “troubled by her nerves”. Colin persuaded her to go to the doctor, and she wouldn’t have been remotely proud about taking pills for “her nerves” even if he didn’t call them her “nerves”, but he was the kind that worshipped at the shrine of mindfulness and CBT, and she most certainly didn’t want to concentrate her mind on it and had no intention of talking about it.

     She much preferred Colin’s suggestion of a “much-needed” holiday, though she knew she’d have to come back, and though she’d have loved to believe all would be well when they returned, she knew differently.

     Whilst Colin and Glenda were in Scotland, a dark blue people-carrier drew up outside Crocus Cottage, and a couple got out of it. The man was wearing the uniform of a security guard, and he worked guarding the storage units on the industrial estate. The woman was wearing sunglasses, although the day was bright. “That’s for us,” he said, and anyone seeing them would have thought that he was giving her hand a squeeze.

     “It’s not for sale, Al!” she said.

     “What have I told you about defying me?” he asked, maintaining a fixed smile that anyone who saw it, especially from a distance, would have called “cheery”. “This is my home. You know that. Old Man Vincent as good as said I’d have the first chance on it, before he went gaga. I don’t want to have to tell you that again.” Anyone who saw them would have thought he put an arm round her shoulders, and would not have seen the resulting bruise.

     Edward the estate agent was very surprised to get a phone call that afternoon enquiring about Crocus Cottage. “But, sir, it’s not for sale!” he exclaimed. “It WAS on the market, until a few months ago, but a couple have moved in now.” He nearly added “they’re on holiday at the moment” – only that morning he’d received a good old fashioned postcard with a highland view, but then decided that it was none of this man’s business.

     “My mistake, sorry to bother you.”

     “No worries.”

     Before Christmas, Al and Barbara moved into Crocus Cottage. Stella truly wasn’t nosey, and wasn’t superstitious, either, but she was beginning to wonder if Crocus Cottage had turned into an unlucky house. Colin and Glenda had moved out and poor Glenda was – not very well. And this unfortunate lady had her arm in a sling.