A hundred and fifty thousand pounds. A hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year. In the middle of the night, Dan lay in bed and watched Bea sleeping, and hated her. A hundred and fifty thousand. Her rounded cheek was resting on her open hand. She looked about twelve years old. Innocent. This didn’t need to have happened, this wasn’t where they had to be. He thought of their rain-soaked, stupid honeymoon in Yorkshire, his two cheap M&S suits, the slip-on shoes he hated. He thought of the smell of their old clothes, drying by the radiators, and the twisting in his stomach every time Bea sat down to do the sums for the month. He thought of how she pretended to worry about paying each bill, and made him feel guilty for every takeaway coffee, and sick with himself for going along with her lie. For three years he had hardly let himself think of it; her money, like coins that stacked and heaped and shuffled in an arcade coin-pusher, but never fell. Bea had the key. She could open up the back of the machine, at any time. They could be holding fistfuls of gold, and she knew it, but she kept pretending, fixing broken soles onto her shoes, and telling him how lucky she felt. Lucky. He had thrown away his dreams to spend his days showing strangers around stinking flats vacated by the corpses of threadbare old men; hoping for his reduced, only fair, non-exploitative 1 per cent commission to drag them into the next month, and the next mortgage payment, never having any choices, never doing anything they wanted with the one precious life they had. Because of her. Because of her, his future was in cold storage, and had dried up, and gone. She talked about believing in him, but all the time she held him back.

‘Bea, wake up.’ He pushed her shoulder. ‘Wake up.’

He pushed her again, and she jumped.

‘Where’s Alex?’ she said.

He switched on the light, and she screwed up her eyes in the glare.

‘What’s happened?’ She groped for her phone. It was three o’clock in the morning.

‘Nothing,’ said Dan. ‘Sorry, babe, I didn’t mean to scare you, but we need to talk.’

‘What about?’

It was wrong to discuss it in bed. ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘You need to.’

‘What is it?’

He pulled on his jeans, and, stumbling, she followed him downstairs to the first, small, sitting room.

‘Dan?’

The moonlight coming through the window made squares on the floor. Dan felt his way along the wall, to a standard lamp, and switched it on. It was reflected, misshapen, in the black windows.

‘Sit down,’ he said.