Of course they had a cleaner.
She furnished me with tea, croissants, jam and bits of the paper. ‘What do you want to be depressed by? The stagnant house market, the rising price of ski holidays or the dangers of uncontrolled immigration?’
‘I’ll take immigration. I need a laugh. You know, you should get them to interview you. Young Tory lawyer who had a black immigrant dad. They’d choke on their crumpets.’
Oh dear. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned her dad. But she only said, ‘I’m not a Tory. I just married one. It could happen to anyone.’
‘Where is Rich, by the way?’ It was easy to forget someone else lived in this palace of white and sisal; he was so seldom there.
‘Went into the office.’
‘On a Sunday?’ Of course he did. I shouldn’t have asked. I might have been a lot poorer than most of my friends— if we were the UN, I’d be Yemen—but at least I could lie in bed and mope whenever I wanted to. You couldn’t put a price on that.
I was reading an article on house prices and feeling gloom settle over me. ‘I’ll never get on the property ladder again. There’s a cardboard box here for sale for a hundred grand. Apparently, it’s “bijou” and “compact” and made of “environmentally friendly materials”.’
‘You’re not off the ladder. You’ve just stepped away for a while, is all.’
‘Fell off, more like.’
‘Frank fell off a ladder once. Broke his leg in three places.’
That was me, I reflected gloomily. Fallen back to earth with a crash, while up above me everyone else just kept on climbing that damn ladder. It was like doing gymnastics in PE all over again. ‘How are your mum and Frank?’
‘Fine. Talking about joining the Caravan Club, so that’ll be nice and embarrassing for Rich’s parents when we have them over at Christmas. They think caravans are for stable hands and New Age travellers.’
I wondered again how Cynthia felt about the fact her dad had never tried to contact her. I’d known her as long as Emma, the three of us meeting in the first term at Bristol Uni, huddling together in a refuge against the posh girls with long blonde hair, ski outfits and double-barrelled names, but sometimes I still had no idea what she thought about things.
‘So you’re house-hunting today?’ she said.
‘Urgh. Yes. Nightmare.’
‘You can stay here as long as you like, you know that?’
‘Thank you. But I think me and my existential crisis need a room of our own.’
Cynthia dropped me off at the station in her BMW, pointing out helpfully where I had croissant flakes in my hair, and I began the first of my viewings.
Two years ago, when we were still congratulating ourselves on our good life decisions—getting married, eating five portions of fruit and veg a day, opening pensions—Dan and I had bought a semi in suburbia, which wasn’t much but had two bedrooms, a bathroom that wasn’t incubating new species of mould, and a small scrappy patch of grass where we sentimentally thought our children would play, and before that our border collie, or golden retriever; we hadn’t got that far yet. Remembering some of the places I’d lived before this, I dreaded flat-hunting.
Now, I like to think I’m a fairly positive person.
I mean, I’m not, not at all, but I like to think it, and I try to give what my Buddhist friend Sunita calls ‘a cosmic yes to the universe’. Spending the day flat-hunting in London is enough to make you give a giant no, no, no, and hell no to the universe, and crawl back into bed with the duvet over your head, reflecting on how you can’t really afford a bed, or even a duvet. My day went something like this:
The ‘sunny studio’ in Sydenham turned out to be one room with a single bed in a house share of five other people, one of whom showed me the room wearing just a pair of Y-fronts and a jokey rape-themed T-shirt. ‘You’re OK with parties, right? One house rule though is everyone, like, has their own stash. It’s just cooler that way.’ No.
The ‘quiet garret room’ in Blackheath was a single bed in an alcove off the living room of a nervy older lady.
‘There’s no door?’ I said, edging to the window. The place was where light came to die and there was a strong smell of cat pee.
‘Oh, no. The little ones don’t like to be shut out.’ She said this cooing at one of the three cats I had spotted so far, a black tom with a scar over one eye and a malevolent glare out of the other.
The bedcover was chintz, approximately forty years old, and as she showed me it, a different, ginger cat jumped off the wardrobe and raked its claws over my neck. ‘Oh, he likes you!’
No.
The ‘lovely room in modern flat with friendly city gent’ in Docklands turned out to be a nice place, if a bit ‘chrome and leather are the only decorative materials that exist, aren’t they’ for my taste, but I was followed round at a distance of three centimetres by Mike, the owner, who told me at least five times he didn’t need the money, like, he earned a packet in the City, but he wanted a bit of ‘feminine companionship’ round the place. No.
The ‘delightful double in house with fun girl’ turned out to be the living room, turned into a bedroom, in the flat of Mary from Camden, who handed me a list of her ‘house rules’ when I stepped in. First was, always take off your shoes when entering and put on special slippers, which were embroidered with cat faces.
No, no, no, hell no.
The only thing that made house-hunting vaguely bearable was to imagine I was researching locations for a new gritty TV show where people got murdered in the dingiest possible flats. CSI: Croydon. I put in my headphones as I trudged about and asked myself what Beyoncé would do, as I often pondered in moments of stress. Well, probably she’d charter her private helicopter and get airlifted to one of her mansions, so that was no use. I repaired to a café in Kentish Town, trying to cheer myself up with tea and a Florentine. Then the bill came to £4.50 and I realised I might not be able to afford cafés at all after this. I’d have to be one of those people who knitted jumpers and always took their own sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil, just like at school. This wasn’t what I’d grown up for. It was depressing indeed to realise you were no further up the pecking order than you were at seven.
I was on my phone, scanning the property websites for anything under £700 that didn’t look likely to have fleas/mould/sleazy landlords. Could I live in Catford? Was that even in London? Would I be able to stomach a large flat share, given I currently worked from home? Alternatively, could I live and work in a studio flat where you couldn’t open the fridge without moving the bed? Could I possibly get my freelance work going again to the point where I’d actually make some money?
I began scrawling figures on a napkin, but it was too scary, so I ordered another Florentine instead and then worried about money and calories and being single again at thirty. Not even single. Divorced.
I was getting back into some very bad thoughts—you should ring Dan, beg him to take you back, you can’t afford this, you can’t manage alone—when my phone rang. Emma. ‘Are you busy?’
‘No. Just contemplating the ruins of my life.’
‘Oh dear, is it not going well?’
‘Put it this way, the only person with less luck than me at choosing where to live is Snow White. I’ve seen most of the seven dwarves today—Grumpy, Horny, Druggy …’
‘Remind me again why you had to move out. It was your house too, and he was the one who wanted—’