miss you.
I can’t do this on my own.
I didn’t send them, and for the rest of the night my phone stayed as dark and silent as the R.E.M. CD that was now buried somewhere under my bedding plants, ex–bedding plants, in a garden I’d probably never see again. I thought of him saying two years before: I’ll never leave you, Rachel.
Yeah, right. But then, neither of us had exactly kept the promises we made that day.
When I woke up in Cynthia’s white-cotton-and-distressed-wood (why would it be distressed? It’s in a lovely house in Chiswick. I’ve never understood that phrase) spare room, I’d no idea where I was for a moment. Had I fallen asleep in a branch of the White Company? Then it all came back and I felt the first tears of the day push against my eyelids. None of that. Today I had to find somewhere to live. I got ready in the en suite, with its rainfall shower and roll-top bath (if I was very quiet, maybe I could just stay here forever) and dressed in jeans and Converse. I brushed my hair, as I had to appear like a normal functioning member of society today, and that was hard for me at the best of times.
Cynthia was at the scrubbed wood table with The Sunday Telegraph—she married a Tory; I know, but it can happen to your dearest friends sometimes—croissants and fresh coffee. Unlike how I’d have been on a Sunday in my own kitchen—toothpaste-encrusted jammies and butter in my hair—she was dressed in a grey wool dress and different, equally expensive knee boots. ‘There you are. Ready for the first day of the rest of your life?’
‘I thought that was yesterday.’
‘No, that was the last day of … a different bit of your life.’
‘Catchy.’
‘Croissant? Bagel? Scrambled eggs? Toast?’ Cynthia was one of those people who would hostess you to death if you let them.
‘Croissants would be lovely, thanks. Do you have any tea?’ It was tragically uncool, but I’d never learned to like coffee.
Cynthia found some PG Tips hidden shamefully in a cupboard, holding them away from her as if they were toxic waste, or a shopping bag from Lidl. ‘They must be the cleaner’s.’
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
