Tenant's Handbook
Clause 14.3 concerned the fourth bedroom. The flat had three.
I signed anyway, which sounds worse than it was. You have viewed eleven properties in six weeks, you are being outbid by cash buyers and outmanoeuvred by people with guarantors, and the letting agent is holding a pen out and saying the words *another couple are seeing it at four*, and you skim the schedule because the schedule is always eleven pages of boilerplate about not keeping reptiles.
I did read it. I read it that evening, in the flat, sitting on the floor because the sofa was coming Thursday.
> **14.3** The Tenant shall not enter, nor permit any person to enter, the fourth bedroom. > > **14.4** The Tenant shall not obstruct, cover, seal, remove or otherwise interfere with the door to the fourth bedroom. > > **14.5** Nothing in clauses 14.3 and 14.4 shall be construed as a representation by the Landlord that a fourth bedroom exists.
I read 14.5 four times. It is, I still think, the single most frightening sentence I have ever encountered, and it is written in the exact register of a solicitor declining liability for a garden fence.
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The corridor had four doors.
Three bedrooms and a bathroom, which is four doors, which is what I told myself for the first six days and which was entirely true. Bedroom, bedroom, bedroom, bathroom. Magnolia walls, laminate that had been laid slightly short at the skirting, one ceiling light with a paper shade.
On the seventh day I came home from work and counted five.
I am going to describe this carefully because the way it is usually told — a door appearing — is not what happened, and the difference matters.
Nothing appeared. There was no new door. What happened was that I walked down my own corridor and understood, in the ordinary unremarkable way you understand the layout of your own home, that there were five doors and that this was how many there had always been, and that the fourth one, the one between the second bedroom and the bathroom, was the one I never used.
The feeling was not shock. It was recognition. It was the feeling of remembering something you have always known.
I stood in that corridor for a long time, and the thing that eventually frightened me was not the door. It was that I had to work quite hard to find the fear. It kept sliding off. I had to hold the two facts side by side — *three bedrooms* and *five doors* — and physically keep them there, like holding two magnets the wrong way round, and the moment my attention slipped they came apart and everything was fine again.
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I emailed the agency. I have the reply.
> Dear Mr. Halloway, > > Thank you for your email. Clause 14.3 is a standard provision in respect of this property and is not indicative of any structural feature. Please be assured that the property comprises three (3) bedrooms as advertised. > > If you have concerns regarding the condition of any door, our maintenance team can attend. > > Kind regards, > Nadia > Property Management
*Any door.* Not *the door.* I noticed that and I have never stopped noticing it.
I wrote back and asked, directly, whether previous tenants had raised the same query.
She did not reply for nine days. Then:
> Dear Mr. Halloway, > > I am not able to discuss previous tenancies. > > I would gently remind you of clauses 14.3 and 14.4 and note that the deposit protection scheme treats breach of a specific covenant as a matter for the arbitrator rather than the courts. > > Kind regards, > Nadia
The second one was sent at 11:48pm.
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I lived there fourteen months.
I want to say something unpopular, which is that it was fine. It was a good flat. It was warm, the boiler worked, the neighbours were quiet, and the rent was £200 under market because — I assume — of a clause most people skim.
I did not open the door. That was never in question. Not because I was brave or disciplined but because 14.3 is a clear instruction and I am a person who returns library books.
But I did do one thing, in month nine, which I regret.
I put a hair across it. The oldest trick there is — a single hair, licked and laid across the gap between door and frame at ankle height, the way you do if you think somebody is going into your room.
I did it on a Sunday night. I checked it on Monday morning and it was intact, and on Tuesday, and on Wednesday.
On Thursday it was gone.
Not broken. Not fallen. On the floor directly below where I had put it, laid straight, parallel to the skirting board, arranged.
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I gave notice the next week. Nadia processed it without comment and returned the deposit in full and within the statutory period, which in fourteen months of dealing with letting agents was the only entirely correct thing any of them ever did.
On the last day, with the van outside, I stood in the empty corridor and counted four doors.
Bedroom, bedroom, bedroom, bathroom.
And I stood there for a while trying to make it be five, the way you press a bruise, and I could not do it. It would not come. Whatever it is, it had already finished with me, and I understood that I could have stood there until the van driver came up to find me and it would have stayed four.
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I have thought about that clause for six years now.
14.5 says nothing in the preceding clauses shall be construed as a representation that a fourth bedroom exists.
For a long time I read that as a lawyer's hedge — a way of imposing the rule without conceding the premise.
I have come round to a worse reading.
A representation, in a contract, is a statement of fact that the other party is entitled to rely on. If the landlord had represented that a fourth bedroom existed, and it did not, I would have had a remedy.
They were not protecting themselves from me finding out there was no fourth bedroom.
They were protecting themselves from me finding out there was.
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