I am sitting in the spare, empty austerity of One Folgate Street, utterly content.
My gaze takes in the pristine blankness of the garden. I’ve discovered now why there aren’t any flowers. The garden is modeled on what the Internet tells me are karesansui, the formal meditative gardens of Buddhist temples. The shapes are symbolic: mountain, water, sky. It’s a garden for contemplating, not for growing things.
Edward Monkford spent a year in Japan, after his wife and son died. That’s what made me think to search for it.
Even the Internet is different here. Once Camilla had downloaded the app to my phone and laptop, and handed me the special bracelet that triggers One Folgate Street’s sensors, she connected to the Wi-Fi and typed in a password. Since then, whenever I turn on a device I’m met not by Google or Safari, but by a blank page and the word “Housekeeper.” There are just three tabs: “Home,” “Search,” and “Cloud.” “Home” brings up the current status for One Folgate Street’s lighting, heating, and so on. There are four different settings to choose from: Productive, Peaceful, Playful, and Purposeful. “Search” takes me to the Internet. “Cloud” is my backup and storage.
Every day, Housekeeper suggests what clothes I should wear, based on the weather outside, my appointments, and what’s currently at the laundry. If I’m eating in, it knows what’s in the fridge, how I might cook it, and how many calories it will add to my daily total. Meanwhile, the “Search” function filters out ads, pop-ups offering me a flatter belly, distressing news stories, Top Tens, gossip about minor celebrities, spam, and cookies. There are no bookmarks, no history, no saved data. I am wiped clean every time I close the screen. It’s strangely liberating.
Sometimes I pour myself a glass of wine and simply walk around, touching things, acclimating myself to the cool, expensive textures, adjusting the precise position of a chair or vase. Of course I was already familiar with that saying by Mies van der Rohe, Less is more, but I hadn’t appreciated before just how sensual less could be, how rich and voluptuous. The few pieces of furniture are design classics: Hans Wegner dining chairs in pale oak, white Nicolle stools, a sleek Lissoni sofa. And the house comes with a number of carefully curated but luxurious lesser props—thick white towels, bedsheets made of high-thread-count linen, handblown wineglasses with thermometer-thin stems. Every touch is a small surprise, a quiet appreciation of quality.
I feel like a character in a movie. Amid so much good taste the house somehow makes me walk more elegantly, stand in a more considered way, place myself within each vista for maximum effect. There’s no one to see me, of course, but One Folgate Street itself seems almost to become my audience, filling the sparse spaces with quiet, cinematic scores from Housekeeper’s automated playlist.
Your application is approved. That was all the email said. I’d been reading bad news into the fact the meeting was so short, but it seems Edward Monkford is inclined to brevity in all things. And I’m sure I wasn’t imagining that unspoken undercurrent, that tiny jolt you get when an attraction is reciprocated. Well, he knows where I am, I think. The waiting itself feels charged and sensual, a kind of silent foreplay.
And then there are the flowers. On the day I moved in, they were lying on the doorstep—a huge bouquet of lilies, still wrapped in plastic. No note, nothing to indicate whether this is something he does for all his new tenants or a special gesture just for me. I send him a polite thank-you anyway.
Two days later, another, identical bouquet arrives. And after a week, a third—exactly the same arrangement of lilies, left in exactly the same place beside the front door. Every corner of One Folgate Street is filled with their heavy scent. But really, this is getting to be too much.
When I find the fourth identical bouquet, I decide enough’s enough. There’s a florist’s name printed on the cellophane wrapper. I call them and ask if it’s possible to change the order for something else.
The woman on the other end comes back sounding puzzled. “I can’t find any order for One Folgate Street.”
“It may be under Edward Monkford? Or the Monkford Partnership?”
“There’s nothing like that. Nothing in your area, in fact. We’re based in Hammersmith—we wouldn’t deliver so far north.”
“I see,” I say, perplexed.
Next day, when yet more lilies arrive, I pick them up, intending to throw them in the bin.
And that’s when I see it—a card, the first time one’s been left, on which someone has written:
Emma, I will love you forever. Sleep well, my darling.