‘He’s very domineering,’ said Bea.

Dan said he hated that. ‘My mum’s the boss,’ he said. And he smiled.

Six months later they were living together. Six months after that, he proposed – old-school, with a rose and a ring. They were married eighteen months from their first meeting, and a year on bought their flat. The deposit was made up from Bea’s savings and guilt money Dan’s father had sent him on his twenty-fifth birthday. Twenty-five thousand pounds. One for every year he hadn’t seen him. They called it the ‘adulterer’s cash’. Once, Dan asked Bea if she ever borrowed from her parents. He knew they were well off.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Never.’

Their flat was a one-bedroom first-floor conversion with a brand-new IKEA kitchen.

‘It’s amazing! We’re so lucky!’ she shouted when they moved in, running up and down to touch the windows like a ricocheting pinball – the front, the back, the front – while Dan stood in the middle of the floor and laughed at her.

He changed his job from Foxtons Peckham to Foundations of Holloway. It was her idea. He was still an estate agent but there was a veneer of morality; Foundations only took 1 per cent, whatever the property value. Ethical or not, Dan hated it, from coffee machine to commute, from suit to traffic stink, to almost every single person he met. A fucking estate agent. Ethical. It was just selling houses, or, more often, two rooms above a newsagent, or a basement needing change-of-use. He didn’t mind so much when he had what were termed ‘traditional’ buyers, but London had a dearth of those. Sales were often to overseas investors, or buy-to-let, or developers, wanting to knock everything down and start over. Sometimes Dan closed the deal on a property and closed the door, and pictured it; lights out, and no more human life for months. Nobody to pop out for milk or children on the stairs; a London that was rows and rows of film-set frontages. Selling houses was shit enough, without selling them to people who didn’t need homes.

On bad days he missed her. He would sit on the train, desperate to be home, staring at his reflection and the other ghostly doppelgängers of his fellow travellers; their possible selves, and he would think of all the things he wanted, that he might never find. Fulfilment. Success. Money. Money – everything in London felt as if it were made of it. Cars were made of rolls of it, and clothes of flimsy sweatshop notes. It was all right for Bea, she loved her work, she didn’t mind she wasn’t paid enough for it, but Dan had taken years to get the courage up to study art, and now he didn’t know where to begin. His portfolio was gathering dust under the bed. At night, he would lie with her in his arms and feel it beneath him, unseen and reproachful. He pictured its dusty fingers reaching out to him as he slept, reminding him of his failings. His life was slipping from his grasp, days he would never have again.