What the Valuation Says

The estate agent arrived twelve minutes late and apologised to the house rather than to Diane, which told her something. He moved through the rooms with a clipboard and the faint superiority of a man who had never doubted a decision in his life, and Diane followed him at a distance of roughly one awkward conversation.

She had lived here for nine years. The house knew this in the particular way houses know things — the groove worn into the banister, the third stair that sang whenever you crept down it at two in the morning for reasons you didn't want to examine.

"Good bones," the estate agent said, about the kitchen.

"Thank you," said Diane, as though he'd complimented her personally.

His name was Marcus and he smelled of something expensive applied in too great a quantity. He opened the back door, assessed the garden with a brisk half-glance, and wrote something down. Diane wondered if it was the words *needs work* or simply a small discouraging mark, the kind teachers made. She had been a teacher. She knew the vocabulary of mild contempt.

Upstairs, he paused at the bedroom doorway and she had to resist the urge to say that the bed was hers, not shared, had been hers alone for four of the nine years, and that she had made a kind of peace with this that did not require his evaluation.

"En suite?"

"No."

He made the mark again.

She had called the agency because her sister had told her to, in the gentle insistent way Carol had of suggesting things that felt like instructions. *You can't just stay there, Di. What are you staying for?* And Diane had not been able to answer, which Carol had taken as agreement and Diane had taken as something she hadn't worked out yet.

The thing she was staying for — if she was honest, which she tried to be in the way that cost something — was the view from the bathroom window at six in the morning, when the moor came back out of the dark and the light was the colour of old tea and entirely without comfort or promise, which she found more sustaining than either. She had stood at that window through her father's death and a redundancy and the slow unravelling of something she had called love for longer than she should have. The view had never once told her it would be fine.

She respected that.

Marcus came back downstairs and set his clipboard on the kitchen table where it did not belong. He named a figure. She thought about what the figure would mean — the flat in Leeds that Carol had already found online, the fresh start that everyone kept handing her like a leaflet she hadn't asked for.

"The market's moving," Marcus said. "This time of year especially. You've got a good corner plot."

"I know what I've got," Diane said.

He looked at her then, properly, for the first time. Something shifted in his face — not quite recognition, but the precursor to it, the moment before you understand you've misread a room.

"Take your time," he said, and it sounded, briefly, like he meant it.

After he left she stood in the hall and listened. The house was doing what it always did, which was nothing, which was everything — the tick of the pipe behind the wall, the draught under the front door that she'd never quite fixed, the third stair settling as though someone had just stepped off it.

She was fifty-one years old and she was standing in her hallway deciding nothing, which was itself a kind of decision. She knew this. She had a post-graduate qualification and fifteen years of watching young people make choices they'd dressed up as fate, and she understood the mechanism. She was not above it.

She went into the kitchen and opened a bottle of wine — a good one, one of the Malbecs she'd been keeping back without exactly knowing what for — and poured a glass and took it to the back door and stood looking out at the garden in the late October light. The buddleia needed cutting. She had been meaning to cut it since August. The moor was a dark hem at the edge of everything, just visible above the rooflines, the way it always was.

She would call Carol tomorrow. She would say: I'm thinking about it.

This was true. She was thinking about it the way you think about a word you can't quite reach — circling it, aware of its shape, not ready yet for the moment it arrives and becomes ordinary.

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