Ria poured the tea into two expensive china cups. Ria liked beautiful things and she surrounded herself with the best that money could buy her. Lena liked nice things but, unlike Ria, she always felt the need to save. Lena had too recent a memory of poverty, and she was terrified of ever going back there again. Sometimes she hated herself for it; at other times she congratulated herself on her thriftiness. The downside of the Life was you could have seven lean years or seven fat years. She would never say it out loud but her fear was always the lean years. She had known what it was to be truly poor, and she never wanted that for her own kids. Ria, on the other hand, lived for the moment, and Lena envied her that.

They both had lovely homes, but Lena knew that Ria bought real quality, stuff that would always make its money back – antique chairs that looked like jumble sale items, which Ria would have re-covered, often costing more than Lena would pay for a new three-piece suite, and they would look fantastic. Ria had what her mother-in-law called a ‘good eye’, and although Lena balked at how much Ria would spend on a single item, she had picked up quite a bit of knowledge about antiques along the way. Ria was like that, she drew you into her world, and you were grateful to her for making you a part of it. With her shiny blond hair and lively blue eyes, Ria was a real live wire, and she had a knack of making you believe, for a few hours anyway, that you were a live wire too.

Lena had grown up in a council flat in Hackney. Her mum and dad had been nice people, but they had never had any ambition, not for themselves or for their only child, and Lena had resented them for that. All around her had been large families squeezed into a few rooms, and she had seen those people scrimp and save to see their children better themselves. But not her mum and dad, they had never once asked her what she wanted to do with her life, what dreams she might have had. They had fed her and clothed her, but never once really talked to her.