The Girl Before(5)

He turns to the agent. So how do we take this further?

Ah, the agent says. That’s the tricky bit.





NOW: JANE

“The final stipulation being—what?”

“Despite all the restrictions, you’d be surprised how many people still want to go for it. But the last hurdle is that the architect himself has right of veto. Effectively, he gets to approve the tenant.”

“In person, you mean?”

Camilla nods. “If it even gets that far. There’s a lengthy application form. And of course you have to sign something to say you’ve read and understood the rules. If that’s successful, you get invited to a face-to-face interview wherever in the world he happens to be. The last few years, that meant Japan—he was building a skyscraper in Tokyo. But he’s back in London now. Usually, though, he doesn’t bother with the interview. We just get an email saying the application’s been rejected. No explanation.”

“What sort of people get accepted?”

She shrugs. “Even in the office, we can’t see any pattern. Although we have noticed that architecture students never get through. And you certainly don’t need to have lived in a place like this before. In fact, I’d say it’s a drawback. Other than that, your guess is as good as mine.”

I look around. If I’d built this house, I think, what kind of person would I choose to live in it? How would I judge an application from a prospective tenant?



“Honesty,” I say slowly.

“Sorry?” Camilla’s looking at me, puzzled.

“What I take out of this house isn’t just that it looks nice. It’s how much commitment has gone into it. I mean, it’s uncompromising, obviously; even a bit brutal in some ways. But this is someone who’s put everything, every ounce of passion he has, into creating something that’s one hundred percent as he wants it. It has—well, it’s a pretentious word, but it has integrity. I think he’s looking for people who are prepared to be equally honest about the way they live in it.”

Camilla shrugs again. “You may be right.” Her tone suggests she doubts it. “So, do you want to go for it?”

By nature, I am a careful person. I rarely make decisions without thinking them through: researching the options, weighing the consequences, working out the pros and cons. So I’m slightly taken aback to hear myself saying, “Yes. Definitely.”

“Good.” Camilla doesn’t sound at all surprised, but then who wouldn’t want to live in a house like this? “Come back to the office and I’ll find you an application pack.”





THEN: EMMA


1. Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life.

I pick up my pen, then put it down again. A list of everything I want to keep would take all night. But then I think some more, and that word essential seems to float out of the page at me. What, really, is essential? My clothes? Since the breakin I’ve virtually been living in the same two pairs of jeans and an old baggy sweater. There are some dresses and skirts I’d want to take, obviously; a couple of nice jackets, my shoes and boots, but nothing else I’d really miss. Our photographs? They’re all backed up online. My few half-decent pieces of jewelry were taken by the burglars. Our furniture? There isn’t a piece that wouldn’t look tacky and out of place in One Folgate Street.

It occurs to me that the question has been worded this way deliberately. If I’d been asked to make a list of what I could do without, I’d never have managed it. But by putting the thought in my head that really none of it’s important, I find myself wondering if I can’t just shed all my things, my stuff, like an old skin.

Maybe that’s the real point of The Rules, as we’ve already dubbed them. Maybe it isn’t simply that the architect’s a control freak who’s worried we’ll mess up his beautiful house. Maybe it’s a kind of experiment. An experiment in living.



Which, I suppose, would make Si and me his guinea pigs. But actually I don’t mind that. Actually I want to change who I am—who we are—and I know I can’t do it without some help.

Especially who we are.

Simon and me have been together ever since Saul and Amanda’s wedding, fourteen months ago. I knew the two of them from work, but they’re a bit older than me and apart from them I didn’t know many people there. But Simon was Saul’s best man, the wedding was beautiful and romantic, and we hit it off right away. Drinking and talking turned into slow dancing and exchanging phone numbers. And then later we discovered we were staying at the same B&B and, well, one thing led to another. The next day I thought, What have I done? Clearly, this was yet another impulsive one-night stand and I was never going to see him again and would now be left feeling cheap and used. But in fact it was the other way around. Si called the moment he got home, and again the next day, and by the end of the week we were an item, much to the amazement of our friends. Particularly his friends. He works in a very laddish, boozy environment where having a steady girlfriend is almost a black mark. In the kind of magazine Si writes for, girls are “babes” or “hotties” or “cuties.” Page after page is filled with pictures of B&K, as it’s known—bra and knickers—though the articles are mostly about gadgets and technology. If the article is about cellphones, say, there’s a picture of a girl in her underwear holding one. If the article is about laptops, she’ll still be in her undies but wearing specs and typing on the keyboard. If the article is about underwear, she probably won’t be wearing any underwear at all, but instead holding it up as if she’s just slipped it off. Whenever the magazine throws a party, the models all turn up dressed pretty much as they appear in the magazine, and then the pictures of the party get splashed all over the magazine too. It isn’t my scene in the least, and Simon told me early on that it wasn’t his either—one of the reasons he liked me, he said, was because I wasn’t anything like those girls, that I was “real.”