‘Well, you’re in the right job if you do choose to buy around here,’ I said.
Eyes open once more, she licked the trifle spoon in front of her face as she studied me. ‘It’s not a question of choice. We’ve got no chance. Even one-bedders are pushing half a million, at least they are in the buildings we would want to live in.’
She and Kit glanced about them once again, not asking what they wanted to know: how much we’d paid for our place. How much it was worth was public knowledge since a similar house on the square was currently on the market for £2.3 million. In Greenwich or Camberwell, it would be a million more; in Kensington, five million more. It was all relative, but I’d lived long enough to know that people compared up, not down – and not only in terms of property.
‘Luckily, we’re ancient enough to have bought when St Mary’s was a no-go area without a direct train into town,’ Clare said, her standard line, though neither of us had in fact been involved in the transaction. The property had been acquired by her parents when they’d lived in London briefly in the eighties and theirs remained the names on the deeds. Clare, an only child, would be the sole beneficiary of their estate when the time came. My decade of contributing to the bills was easily offset by the absence of rent; even if I wanted them to – and I didn’t – no lawyer was going to argue that the house was anything but an Armstrong treasure.
‘Believe it or not, you used to be able to get a mortgage for a place like this on just one person’s salary,’ Clare added, as if imparting word of a juicy scandal. ‘The average price of a house in London in 1986 was fifty-five thousand.’
‘Stop!’ Kit groaned, alcohol lending a camp extravagance to his manner. ‘To be told that if we’d just been born a few years earlier, we could have had what we wanted without lifting a finger.’
‘Well, not quite,’ Clare said, with a note of correction.
‘You’d still have to have had a nose for up-and-coming areas,’ Melia agreed, her professional instincts allowing a more nuanced envy than Kit’s. ‘And work incredibly hard to save for the deposit.’
He scoffed at this. There was an ingredient to his manner I couldn’t quite identify. Something childish, a propensity to sulk, perhaps. ‘Yeah, but compare that with now. We could work 24/7 and still never come close. We couldn’t even buy our rental on Tiding Street.’
Tiding Street was a road of narrow terraces on the other side of the high street from us, not long transformed from near slums to desirable starter flats unaffordable to starter people.
‘Nice street. How long have you lived there?’ I asked.
‘Six months. We were over in Blackheath before, so we’re still getting to know St Mary’s.’
‘What do you think of us so far?’
He smirked. ‘I think you’re great – except for all the mums and babies.’
‘Kit!’ Melia protested. ‘You can’t say that!’
‘What? It’s true. They charge down the high street with their buggies, expecting you to jump out the way. I mean, for fuck’s sake, they’d rather you got hit by a bus than they should have to slow down for two seconds.’
‘I think new parents don’t always notice. They’re in a different mental zone from us,’ Clare said, amused.
‘They’re mental all right.’
There was that moment of collective elation when a group understands it agrees on something fundamental. As child-free fortysomethings, Clare and I were getting rarer by the year, marooned in a neighbourhood that had grown ever more family-friendly now the inner zones were unaffordable for most. Though Kit and Melia were still young and, presumably, fertile and might very well change their minds, they were for now at least in our camp.
‘The only real downside is the commute,’ Kit said. ‘The overland is a nightmare, isn’t it? I’m always late for work and that’s if I can squeeze on in the first place.’
Clare and I exchanged a look.
‘Those rush-hour trains are more than twice over capacity,’ I said. ‘Well over legal limits. I’ve complained repeatedly.’
They listened nonplussed as I detailed the complaints process. They hadn’t taken me for a consumer rights activist.
‘I’m quite claustrophobic,’ I explained, ‘so public transport is the bane of my life.’
‘He had to cut out the Tube completely,’ Clare said in a confirming tone. ‘He doesn’t like tunnels.’
‘I don’t like being stuck in them.’ I didn’t say that I found the overland passenger experience only minimally less panic-inducing. The trains had sealed windows and were supposedly climate-controlled, but in reality were overheated, commuters crushed against one another like lovers. London would soon need those Tokyo-style paddles to wedge people in.
‘He had to have CBT. Cognitive behavioural therapy,’ she spelled out, but she needn’t have: this age group knew its therapies better than ours.
‘What gets me,’ Kit said, ‘is there’s always some twat who’s jumped on the tracks or whatever. There was one the other day hanging off the bridge. Couldn’t make his mind up. I mean, if I wanted to end it all, I’d fuck off and do it privately, I wouldn’t hold up an entire rail network. That smacks of egomania if you ask me, not lack of self-esteem. This person shouldn’t be topping himself, he should be auditioning for Britain’s Got Talent!’
So much for being more mental health literate! ‘Your compassion for society’s most vulnerable is a beautiful thing,’ Clare joked over Kit’s shouts of laughter at his own comments. So he was a controversialist, I thought. A provocateur – in short, a man after my own heart.
‘I’ve been thinking about switching to the river bus when my season ticket runs out,’ I told him. ‘They’ve just extended the route to St Mary’s and it doesn’t take much longer to get into town.’
‘I heard it’s pretty expensive,’ he said.
Melia took out her phone to google. ‘There’s an introductory discount for annual tickets from St Mary’s bought before the end of January. What d’you say, boys?’
‘A year’s quite a commitment,’ Clare said.
Kit took the phone from Melia and peered at the timetable. ‘What time do you start work?’ he asked me.
‘Quarter past eight. Monday to Friday. Not so different from you corporate drones, eh.’
‘The seven twenty looks like the one then. Gets into Waterloo at eight-oh-five. You’re on my way, I could swing by here at ten past.’
I played along. ‘Five past, to be on the safe side.’
‘The safe side! You’re showing your age there, Jamie.’
Clare shrieked with delight. ‘You tell him, Kit – he’s turning into such an old codger!’
Not the most flattering remark – the sweet little protest Melia made didn’t pass me by – but I couldn’t begrudge Clare her high spirits. She was really sparking off this pair. Normally by now she’d be winding down, co-operating fully with guests’ murmurings about calling an Uber, but tonight she begged them to stay, insisting on sharing her love of 1980s power ballads, vintage videos of which were ceremoniously aired.