by Ali McNamara
I vehemently shake my head, and put my glass back down on the table.
‘You know better than that,’ I say in a stern voice. ‘My judgement is never, ever swayed by a man. Not now. Not ever. Do I make myself clear?’
Kiki, knowing she’s touched a sore spot, nods. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s fine.’ I take another sip of my Guinness, and feel it soothe me. ‘I’m sorry, Kiki,’ I apologise, ‘I shouldn’t have snapped at you. Let’s forget all about men for the moment, eh? We don’t need them on this trip.’
Kiki half-heartedly nods in agreement.
‘What we do need, however, is to do our jobs and find the perfect house with the best view for Mr Dempsey, and remember what we’re really here for.’
Four
After breakfast the next morning – a delicious buffet of every breakfast item you could ever imagine – Kiki and I head out in our hire car in search of properties that might fit our client’s idea of his dream holiday home.
I’d never set out to become a property seeker, far from it. As is often the way in life, I’d fallen into my line of work accidentally. It all started when a friend was struggling to find her perfect home. Fiona had complained to me over the phone several times that she couldn’t find a house that had everything her family required in a property, and they were thinking of staying put rather than settle for second best. I had been horrified to hear this, partly because I felt sorry for them – they’d been trying to make the move back down south for over a year since Fiona’s husband’s company had relocated to London – but selfishly because I wanted Fiona, Simon and their two small children (my godchildren) to be closer to me.
So I’d made it my personal project to find them their ideal home. I’d needed something to take my mind off things – my own life had been pretty dismal back then – and searching for and then visiting properties before I passed them on to Fiona, seemed a kind of therapy.
After weeks of trawling estate agent’s websites, checking out auctions and social media, I found them the house of their dreams. To my delight, they moved in a few months later. The buzz I got from their tangible relief and ensuing happiness in their new home was the best feeling, and gave me the boost I so desperately needed. Through word of mouth, other desperate couples began asking me to do something similar for them, and every success resulted in more people being sent in my direction, until eventually I decided to take the plunge, give up my job as a freelance journalist, and become a professional property seeker. I called my new company The Search for Serendipity, a play on my own name, and the happy accident it sometimes can be when you match a person to the house they’ve always longed for.
That was six years ago, and the company’s still going strong. We’ve developed a nice little sideline as location scouts, with TV and film companies hiring us to find interiors where they can shoot scenes for films or television programmes. But most of our clients are individuals in search of residential homes, or luxury holiday homes – as in the case of the search that had brought us to Ireland.
The company is made up of me, Kiki and Doris, our receptionist, who deals with all the emails, phone calls and letters while we’re out of the office on our searches. In the past, I’ve tried hiring other seekers when the volume of jobs coming into the office got too much for me to handle on my own, but I’ve yet to find anyone who shares the knack I seem to have for matching the perfect property with its ideal client. So these days we keep our business small, serving a select few clients at any one time. Of the many requests that come pouring into the office, I’m lucky enough to be able to pick the ones that appeal to me, the ones where I feel a certain empathy with the client, and turn the rest away.
‘So, where are we starting this morning?’ Kiki asks, unfolding a map and setting it on the dashboard in front of her.
I’m driving again today. I preferred it that way; I felt more in control. Plus, when we’d looked into insuring Kiki to drive the hire car too, we’d found it to be ridiculously expensive, because she was still under twenty-five.
‘I thought we’d start with a drive around the Ring of Tara,’ I tell her as I pull out of the hotel gates. ‘I’ve already plotted it on the satnav.’
‘Sounds good,’ Kiki says, settling back into her seat. ‘You’ve properties to visit on the way, I assume?’
While Kiki handles all the day-to-day organisation of the company, I like to do all the property hunting myself. I’ve always been particular, as Doris puts it – or anal-retentive, according to Kiki – when it comes to work. I prefer the term fastidious; I want everything done just right. And if I’m doing it myself, there’s no danger of anyone letting me down.
‘Of course I have properties,’ I tell Kiki, ‘on paper. I’m not sure any of them will be right for Mr Dempsey, but you never know until you see them for yourself, do you?’
‘And you’ll be keeping your eye on all the others we pass, eh?’ Kiki says knowingly. ‘Just in case . . . Gum?’ She offers me a stick.
I shake my head. ‘No thanks. You know on spec is how we find a lot of places – especially the expensive ones.’
‘Yeah, like I said yesterday, money talks.’ Kiki unwraps her stick of gum and pops it in her mouth.
We continue heading out of town and pick up one of the west coast of Ireland’s biggest tourist trails: the Ring of Tara, a long circular route that we were promised would provide us with some fantastic scenery along the way.
‘Can we have the radio on, Ren?’ Kiki asks after we’ve been travelling about five minutes. ‘It’s awfully dull without it.’
‘Gee, thanks!’ I reply as I twist the knob on the dashboard. ‘And I love your company too!’
‘Ah, you know I don’t mean anything by it,’ Kiki says good-naturedly. ‘I like my music, that’s all.’
She fiddles with the tuning dial until she comes to a station she finds acceptable, and immediately the car is filled with the voice of Ed Sheeran.
I listen to Kiki sing along for a few moments, and I’m amused at her incorrect lyrics.
‘I think you’ll find that’s seventy he’s singing he’ll love her to,’ I tell her kindly, ‘not seventeen.’
Kiki turns to look at me in astonishment. ‘Do you know, I’ve always wondered why he sang that?’ She nods her head approvingly. ‘That song makes a lot more sense now.’
I shake my head and smile as I look out at the beautiful countryside we’re driving through. Even though the roads are narrowing and becoming extremely twisty and turning as we begin to climb higher, I’m still managing to look out of my window occasionally at the scenery we pass and I’m beginning to understand why Mr Dempsey – or Ryan, as he insists I call him – is so keen for us to find him a holiday home here.
‘Ah, Miss Parker,’ he’d enthused when he first came to see us in the office, ‘there’s nothing like it in the world. From the rolling green hillsides with majestic mountains soaring up above them into the heavens, to the soft quiet valleys with their gentle streams trickling through their heart, the Kerry countryside has always been special, and will always mean home to me.’
I think about this now as I drive, and Kiki hums away to the radio. Home is a peculiar word, one which most people use to mean their current place of residence. But in the job I do, I find it’s often used the way Ryan Dempsey used it – a place where that person felt contented; a place where they felt happy, safe and secure; a place they felt truly at peace with life.
I’ve never known anywhere like that. I’ve had homes in the sense of places I’ve lived in; flats, houses, the Victorian terrace in London I live in now. But the closest I’ve ever come to calling somewhere home in the sense Ryan meant . . . would have to be my parents’ house in the remote part of Northumberland I grew up in. But even that wasn’t home any more; not since Dad took early retirement and him and Mum decided to move to Spain. Northumberland, although beautiful, couldn’t compete with the lure of guaranteed sunshine all year round.
Something about th
e Irish countryside I’m driving through now reminds me a little of Northumberland, and that thought makes me smile.
‘What ya smiling about?’ Kiki asks. ‘Are you thinking about Finn?’
‘I most certainly am not!’ I say, shaking myself from my thoughts. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’
‘Your smile. I don’t see you smile like that too often. It was sort of warm and dreamy.’
‘Well, I can assure you I was not thinking about our hotel manager.’ I glance at a signpost as we pass, our first stop shouldn’t be too far from here. ‘I was thinking about the countryside here; how pretty it is.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘I was. It reminds me of where I grew up.’
‘Bambi Castle?’
‘Bamburgh. And we didn’t actually live in the castle, we lived not far from there.’
Kiki looks out of the window. ‘I guess both places have lots of hills.’
‘No, it’s not that, it’s . . . something else.’ I can’t quite put my finger on what that thing is, though. ‘Oh, I think we’ve arrived at the first place.’
We stop in the middle of a village filled with whitewashed stone cottages, and I pull up in front of a post office, which because it’s on the Ring of Tara also doubles as a gift shop.
‘Right, we can walk from here,’ I tell Kiki. ‘Then I can explore some of the village along the way and see if it’s suitable.’
We grab our bags, lock up the car, and set off in search of our first house.
As I had expected from my research on the area, the village is tiny. Aside from the post-office-cum-gift-shop, the only other public building is a pub.
First box ticked, I think silently as we head out of the village along a narrow road up a hill towards the first house I wanted to view; Ryan had requested a pub nearby.
‘How far along here is it?’ Kiki asks, squinting up at the sun which has decided to make a fleeting appearance through the many clouds filling the sky this morning.
‘Not far; but it’s going to be a bit remote – after all, that’s what Mr Dempsey wants.’
A few minutes’ walk along the tree-lined road, we spot a For Sale sign poking out of a high hedge.
‘This must be it,’ I say, hurrying along the road a bit further. I pause before I open the gate, and turn to look out in the direction the house faces. The information I’d been sent by the estate agent said the house had views over rolling green valleys, down towards a lake. But from where I’m standing, all I can see are tall, bushy trees. I look up towards the house; it’s set high up on a steep slope, so maybe there are better views from the windows? At the very least, the upstairs ought to have a clear view.
I’ve been informed the house is currently uninhabited after the previous owner defaulted on their mortgage. This generally makes my job much easier, because in return for a quick sale it’s often possible to negotiate a lower price for my client. It also means we can take a preliminary look around without having to explain ourselves to an estate agent or householder, so I open the gate and set off towards the house with Kiki in tow, eager to see what we might find.
‘Nah,’ I say, shaking my head after we’ve spent a few minutes in the derelict garden. ‘It’s not right. Even from the upstairs windows, you’re not going to get a clear view down to that valley – and that’s the main thing Ryan – I mean, Mr Dempsey – wants: a fabulous view, preferably with a lake.’
‘You can call him Ryan,’ Kiki says, pulling a pair of Ray Bans from her bag and putting them on. ‘You don’t have to be all official with me. But I agree: from the moment we got out of the car, this place didn’t feel right to me.’
I smile. Even I can’t tell that early whether a property is going to be right or not.
‘Well, you were correct,’ I tell her. ‘Let’s head back to the car: we’ve plenty of other places to be stopping at on the way.’
So we set off again, but it wasn’t to be our lucky morning. On paper, the houses I’d picked out had promised so much, but each one turned out to be lacking – often in more than one respect. None offered the combination of amenities, views and local facilities that Ryan Dempsey was looking for. But I’m used to disappointments of this nature; sometimes it can take weeks to find the right property, and even then I can never be 100 per cent certain the client will agree.
Undaunted, we stop for lunch at a pub by a bubbling river, taking a seat outside at a wooden picnic table to make the most of the sun, now that the clouds have started to disperse around it.
‘Not a great start, eh?’ Kiki says after we’ve ordered our food from a jolly woman wearing a navy-and-white striped apron.
‘No, but I never expect it to be. It’s so rare we find something quickly.’
‘And even if we do find something, you always spend ages checking all the others out anyway.’
‘I like to cover all eventualities, in case we find something even better.’
Kiki looks around her at the other people having lunch. There are a couple of walkers taking a break from their travels through the Irish hills, but most of the tables appear to be occupied by holidaymakers in trainers, T-shirts and the occasional fleece top.
‘Popular place, this,’ Kiki says, turning back to me.
‘Yes, the Ring of Tara is very popular with tourists. We’ve been lucky not to get caught behind any of the coaches that cruise around here every day.’
‘I wonder why Ryan is so desperate to come and live here?’
I’m about to correct her – regardless of his invitation to address him as Ryan, he’s a client and should therefore be Mr Dempsey – but I decide it’s not worth it. ‘Isn’t it obvious, after what you’ve seen this morning? It’s beautiful.’
‘Yeah, I can see that, but it’s so remote, isn’t it? I mean, Ballykiltara doesn’t seem too bad, but there aren’t a lot of shops – and I don’t mean tourist shops, I mean Top Shop, H&M, the occasional Ted Baker, that kind of thing.’
I smile at her across the table. ‘Maybe there’s no need for those types of outlets here. Maybe the locals have everything they want on their doorstep without the need for fashion boutiques.’
Kiki thinks about this. ‘They probably do a lot of online shopping,’ she says matter-of-factly.
‘Now,’ the lady in the apron is back. ‘Your food won’t be long, girls, but here’s your drinks to be going on with.’ She places two Diet Cokes on the table in front of us and smiles. ‘On your holidays, are you?’ she asks, then she sees my black leather notebook with some of my estate agent papers poking out of it. ‘Oh, are you here looking for a house?’ she asks, her eyes wide.
I hurriedly tuck the papers back into my book. ‘Yes, sort of.’
‘Ah, there’s a lot of lovely houses around these parts that would suit the two of you. Property around here don’t go for so much these days.’ She looks between us and lowers her voice. ‘Couple, are you?’
‘No,’ I say, at the same time as Kiki says, ‘Yes.’
‘Ah, don’t be shy about it,’ she tells me. ‘We get all sorts around here, you know. Everybody’s welcome in Kerry. Back with your food in a bit, dears.’ And she winks as she heads off to serve another table.
‘Why did you say we were a couple?’ I hiss, picking up my drink.
‘Because you said we had to remain undercover so as not to attract suspicion from the locals,’ Kiki says, doing the same.
‘I said we shouldn’t tell anyone what we were doing, not that we had to be undercover!’
Kiki shrugs. ‘Same thing. Besides, I think we’d make a great couple – if we were that way inclined.’
I shake my head dismissively at her.
‘Oh, not good enough for you, am I? I see . . . like that, is it?’ she pretends to huff.
‘You love men far too much to even play-act at this,’ I tell her, opening up my book to check where we’re due to stop this afternoon. I’ve noted down addresses for a couple of properties that I have high hopes for.
‘Ye
ah, I do, don’t I?’ Kiki concludes, sitting back and sipping at her Coke. ‘It ain’t ever going to happen, is it? Sorry, Ren, I’m a metrosexual woman through and through.’
‘Heterosexual,’ I correct her. ‘And anyway, after this afternoon we might not have to worry about pretending to be anything we’re not.’ I tap the cover of my book. ‘If one of these houses is the one, it will make life so much easier. It always does if the house we find is actually for sale.’
‘And if it’s not?’
‘Then we’ll cross that tricky little bridge when we come to it.’
Kiki grins. ‘It’s those tricky little bridges I enjoy crossing the most.’
I smile at her. Kiki might relish the challenge of persuading a home-owner to sell when they’d never even thought about it, but I didn’t. I much preferred to find the perfect property in the simplest way I could. Crossing tricky bridges usually involved dealing with awkward people, and dealing with awkward people usually meant trouble. Especially for me.
Five
Our luck doesn’t improve in the afternoon. The viewings go the same way as the ones this morning: each house is lacking some vital detail that would make it the one for Mr Dempsey. So we head back to the hotel to get freshened up after our long day exploring the Ring of Tara.
Even though I’ve been the one doing the driving, it’s Kiki who’s crashed out sound asleep on the bed when I emerge from the bathroom. Feeling much more awake than I had done when we arrived back at our room, I sit on my bed for a few minutes thumbing through the pages of houses we still have to view.
I knew when I accepted this job that it wasn’t going to be easy. Ryan Dempsey had set out very precise criteria for his ideal holiday and future retirement home, and I had wondered from the start whether I was taking on an impossible task. But I like a challenge, and I’d never searched for a property in Ireland before. I’d once found someone a little flat in Dublin online, but this was my first time ‘out in the field’ in the heart of the Irish countryside.