The Landlord's Clause

Opening scene

The solicitor is gone and the folio is open on the kitchen table, and you have read the same clause four times. "The tenant shall be, for the duration of this agreement, ______." The line is real. The ink loops of the words before it are brown with age, but the blank waits, clean, as though it were ruled this morning.

Upstairs, Flat 2's floorboards creak. That will be Daniel, who was three months in arrears when you inherited him, who looked at you on the stair this morning with the particular contempt of a man who assumes a young landlady can be managed. You could write anything. Punctual. Grateful. Quiet. The pen the solicitor left is a good one, heavier than it looks.

You uncap it. The nib catches the light. Above you, the creaking stops, as if the house is listening for what you decide he is.

Turn 1 of 12

I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.

The kitchen smells of the solicitor's lavender water and your own coffee, gone cold. The folio lies open where he left it, its leather corners softened by decades of handling. You have not touched it since he closed the door. Outside, a van passes with its radio too loud, and then the street is quiet again.

You are not meant to be here. You are meant to be at your desk in Bloomsbury, checking citations in a monograph on Byzantine trade law, losing yourself in the particular satisfaction of a well-placed footnote. Instead you are a freeholder. Instead you own three human beings in a building that should, by rights, be four flats of overpriced student housing.

The blank line waits. You read the clause again, aloud this time, to hear how it sounds in your voice: "The tenant shall be, for the duration of this agreement, ______." Your breath fogs the old ink. The pen the solicitor left is heavy, yes, but not ceremonial. It is a pen meant for signing cheques and initialing duplicates. It is a pen for ordinary cruelty.

Above, the floorboards creak once more. Daniel, settling. Or Daniel, listening. You imagine him up there in Flat 2 with his unpaid rent and his contempt, imagining you down here with your inheritance and your hesitation. The power is not the pen. The power is that you are still considering it.

You cap the pen. You close the folio. The leather makes a sound like a held breath released. You will make tea first, you decide. You will do one ordinary thing before you decide what kind of landlord you are.

The kettle boils. Through the window above the sink, you watch Mrs. Adeyemi emerge from the street door with her shopping trolley, her headscarf bright against the grey afternoon. She has lived here thirty years. She signed her own blank line, the solicitor said, in another age. She pauses on the pavement and looks up, directly at your window, as if she knows you are watching.