The Previous Owners Left a List of Rules

The handover was normal — keys, meter readings, the warranty for the boiler. Then the seller, an elderly man moving to be near his daughter, pressed a sealed envelope into my hand at the door, held my eyes a beat too long, and said, 'Read it the first night. All of it. I'm sorry.' Then he left, quite quickly for a man his age.

Inside was a single sheet, typed, headed HOUSE RULES, and a list:

'1. Do not lock the back bedroom door. She doesn't like it and she'll make sure you know. 2. Leave the landing light on between midnight and dawn. It's not for you. 3. If you hear the piano at night, don't go and look. Just say "goodnight, Margaret" from your room, and it stops. 4. The cold patch on the stairs is hers. Don't stand in it; step around, it's only polite. 5. She won't hurt you. She just wants the house run properly. We were happy here. You will be too, if you keep to these.'

We laughed. Of course we laughed. We're rational people; we assumed a lonely old man's eccentric joke or an elaborate estate-agent quirk. We locked the back bedroom the first night purely out of contrarian spite.

The door was unlocked in the morning. From the inside — the little key was on the floor of the room, on the far side, though we'd locked it from the hall and pocketed the key, and I found that key still in my dressing-gown pocket, so there were two keys, or the one key had made a journey no key makes.

We stopped laughing incrementally, over the first fortnight, as the list proved itself line by line. The landing light we now leave on — the two nights we forgot, we woke to every light in the house on and a sense of profound disapproval, a house holding its breath in a way that has a texture. The cold patch on the stairs is real, sensor-confirmed, immovable, exactly where the list says. And the piano — we don't have a piano; there is no piano in the house; there has never, per the deeds and the neighbours, been a piano — plays, some nights, softly, a few bars of something old and sad, from the direction of the back bedroom, and we lie in the dark and say, in unison now, a little tremulous, 'goodnight, Margaret,' and it stops. Every time. It stops.

We've been here three years. We keep the rules. The house is, as promised, happy — genuinely; it's warm and easy and we've never been burgled and things we lose turn up tidily. Margaret runs a good house. When we eventually sell, we'll hand the next owners an envelope, and hold their eyes a beat too long, and say we're sorry, and mean: you're welcome.