An empty gesture

Slightly nervous, Barbara and I headed for the lawyer’s yesterday. In theory the vendor could have decided he didn’t fancy the deal and pulled out. Having shaken hands on it, this was highly unlikely. But you never know. Of course, we could do the same as well. We joked that we should turn up an hour late for the meeting, just to worry them.

We couldn’t do it, though. And as we were just about to go into the lawyer’s office we spotted the vendor dawdling slowly along the street, looking in every shop window. He was in danger of being on time. When he spotted us it was all smiles, a firm handshake for me and a kiss on both cheeks for Barbara. Up the steep stairs in the lawyer’s office we had to wait a few minutes which was slightly more awkward because we simply don’t speak enough Spanish to make small talk.

After a few minutes we were called through. The reason for the delay was that our negotiator was meeting the lawyer about another deal she’s involved in, a slightly bigger one than ours, involving millions of euros. We went into the boardroom and sat in exactly the same places as before, Barbara and I next to each other facing the negotiator and vendor with the lawyer in between. There was the usual long process of photocopying documents and the lawyer taking details of things such as the number of the certified cheque for the deposit. (This counts as part of the declared price, so it didn’t need to be cash.) Meanwhile the seller was asking the negotiator about the coloured bands on her wrist and she was explaining how they represented feelings including “serenity”, which was the last word anybody would use to describe her frantic lifestyle. Then he pointed to the ordinary elastic band on his wrist which he said he wore for luck. It had been wrapped round a bundle of notes from the bank. Then he proudly showed us pictures of his young boy on his mobile phone.

We carried on signing and countersigning documents. Then the vendor gave us details of who to contact for pool maintenance and so on. Other details were exchanged until Barbara asked the question which completely stopped everybody dead in their tracks. “What’s the address?” she said. The vendor looked at the contract, then at the lawyer. The negotiator looked at the lawyer who eventually said: “It is not unusual for a house in Ibiza not to have an address. There is no postal service for this area.” It’s still hard to imagine that happening in the UK.

Eventually we went with our negotiator for a triumphant bottle of Cava in a square we always bump into friends, well nearly always, because this time there was nobody to share the moment with us. That was a shame because a big disappointment was on the way.

Although we’d discussed renting the house furnished and when we’d visited it on Monday there had been some furniture, we’d never formally agreed anything. So, although we knew it might happen, we couldn’t quite believe it when we opened the door and found there was nothing left at all. Even the curtain rails had gone. We phoned our negotiator and she said she would come up to the house the following day to help sort things out. That turned out to be the only time she forgot to meet us.

So there we were sitting on the window sill of our new house on a Friday lunchtime with no beds, bedding, chairs, tables or anything useful. Even our mobile phones wouldn’t work because of the hills around us. We did, however, have one piece of luck. In the process of moving our stuff into the warehouse for storage I’d dropped our phone and it was still under the seat in the car. And it worked.

It’s at times like these, as they say, that you find out who your friends are. A couple of calls and people rallied round. One, who was on his way back from Barcelona, offered us a bed if we could find a way to transport it, not an easy task as it’s a king-size four poster. Fortunately another friend Steve has an ex-army Land Rover and trailer so helped with that, along with providing us with an awful lot of stuff he had in storage. He and his wife Diana are, in some ways, in the opposite position to us having a rented a furnished house and having to find storage space for much of their own stuff.

By ten that evening we at least had a bed to sleep in and chairs to sit on, but we needed to eat. Zombie-like we drove to the local town and sat outside a bar eating cheese sandwiches wondering if we were completely mad. It was a question we asked ourselves repeatedly as we rushed, or attempted to rush, round shops trying to buy essentials. I always hated Ikea, but I was beginning to see the advantage of having everything in one place. In Ibiza there’s a different shop for everything, none open on a Sunday and many shut on Saturday afternoon.

There are some good things about an enforced break from shopping. Sunday was Barbara’s birthday and in the UK we’d have spent in B&Q. Instead, friends had booked a table at a restaurant by the beach for a late lunch. Eating paella and drinking Cava on a balmy afternoon began to revive our faith in our new home. Then we moved on to another beach and a club called “Bora Bora”. A few hours dancing in the open air restored our endorphins to face a week of trying to make the house habitable.