Mystery

I met my new client in his drive. It was a lovely sunny day, and as my car drew up, he opened the front door and walked towards me, beaming all over his face. I shook his hand and couldn’t help beaming back. ‘Come and see the place!’ he said, gesturing towards the door, at the same time as gripping my hand in a very enthusiastic handshake.

The house was a range of converted outbuildings, which once belonged to the adjoining rectory. They were low, long, mellow brick, with steeply pitched, slightly uneven roofs of various angles, there were a couple of little porches under catslide roofs over the entrance doors and a dinky little scrabble of open cart lodges bordering the shingled drive. A high, old brick wall separated the house and garden from its neighbour, with vines and Virginia creeper, beginning to turn that lovely shade of red, covering large areas of brickwork.

We walked around the house to the rear, where a long, shady lawn, with some huge mature beech trees, stretched down to the river bank, where there were reeds, water lilies and willows. The afternoon sun turned everything golden and the little man beside me chatted away, telling me about the move from the other side of the country to be near his grown up children. It was very pleasant.

He introduced me to his wife, a tired looking but friendly woman. She walked with a limp and had a bent back. Her husband told me she was disabled, and my brief was to make some adaptations to the house to enable her to use it.

As we toured the building, I began to wonder why he had bought it. He was quite elderly, a retired vet, and from the sounds of his wheezing breath, I thought he either had asthma or emphysema. The house was charming, but the garden was huge, and would take a great deal of maintenance, just to keep the lawns in check. The rooms were not all on one level, there were little steps in every doorway; in one corridor you took three steps up, turned a very tight corner and took two steps down. The kitchen was in a tiny lean to, most inconvenient and several rooms away from the dining room. One bedroom was in the roof space, up a dog-leg of a staircase and you had to duck to miss the tie beam stretching across the landing. There was only one bathroom, in a most inconvenient place. From the main bedroom, you would have to go down the stairs, then up another separate staircase to reach it.

There was a vast conservatory in poor repair, which would be cold in the winter, but obscured the view from the sitting room. There was a hallway with no natural light, and a huge study overlooking the drive, which could only be reached through the kitchen.

I very gently suggested that this house would take a lot of altering to suit his wife, and it would not be possible to do some of the things he might wish.

‘Nonsense!’ he said. ‘You’re an architect! I’m sure you will come up with something!’. Well, I tried. I prepared a sketch showing some alterations, which he was very pleased with. What concerned him more than anything else was putting a door onto the open cart lodges. He became quite obsessed with it, sending me stacks of brochures of different (and wildly unsuitable) doors. I couldn’t get cross with him, he was so cheerful.

He and his wife left for his old house to prepare it for sale. While they were away, I did a little more work and emailed him, but heard nothing.

After a couple of weeks, his wife rang me. He had gone for a walk in the local woods and hanged himself. She was distraught. No note, no nothing.

Why?