4. the notaire

We drove to the station that Saturday, we had barely slept the night before. Cathy came with us for help and support. We parked the car at the front and waited for the owners to come out. They looked a bit puzzled, looking around before finally asking about the notaire.
"Well she's not coming today, she's on holidays" I said.
"No no, she said she'll come" they said.
I thought they were just confused, the way old people sometimes are, and decided not to pay attention to their obvious lapse in memory and asked for the tour to start. It was just great, huge rooms and high ceilings, beautiful vegetable garden and mature trees. On the down side there was shit everywhere in the garden where what could only be called Noah's ark was wrecking havoc.
As we went around the corner on our way back into the house and up the first floor, a forty something blonde with the smile of a shark about to make a kill trotted towards us. The notaire.
"I thought I would surprise you. Surprise!" she said.
The thought of losing the introductory fee had been enough of a motivation to bring back her arse all the way from Royan plage. From this moment on poor Mr C. had no voice anymore. It went a bit like this:
Him: "The render needs to be redone, it's quite --"
Her: "Not at all! You could sandblast the corner stones and expose the rest of the stones it would be beautiful"
Him: "No, it would look awful"
Her: "Not at all!!! Mr C. really!"
Him: "It would, underneath it's half brick, half stone."

We made an honest offer but they were being greedy and decided to sit it out. My dad had come up with the figure, asserting it wasn't worth more than that. We also asked him run the negotiations on our behalf as we couldn't be objective (we were already assigning jobs, belle-maman making the curtains, beau-papa digging up the garden).
After much waiting we decided to carry on looking. Within days Fox came up with another short list.