She was not of the kind to be responsive to the talk of houses – and who would want to be who wished to sleep easy at night? – but she heard enough to feel there was some kind of story here. She’d come with a photographer from House & Garden: they were doing a feature on the past retold, on rescued houses, though to tell the truth she thought all such houses were boring as hell. Let the past look after the past was her motto. She was twenty-three and beautiful and lived in a Bauhaus flat with a composer boyfriend who paid the rent and preferred something new to something old any day. ‘Let’s just get it over with,’ she said, ‘earn our living and leg it back to town.’ But she stood over the photographer carefully enough, to make sure he didn’t miss a mullioned window, thatched outhouse, Jacobean beam or Elizabethan chimney: the things that readers loved to stare at: she was conscientious enough. She meant to get on in the world. She tapped her designer boot on original flagstone and waited while he changed his film, and wondered why she felt uneasy, and what the strange muffled breathing in her ears could mean.
