It had been a couple of years since I had helped Amy decorate a place. She had to be pretty desperate to ask me to lend a hand; her days as an art student had made her far more skilled in painting and decorating, in knocking stuff together out of MDF. Every time she asked me to help I remembered how badly we had fought on the last occasion, and determined that this time would be different. It was a generous thing for a brother to do, a brother who often felt in need of ennobling himself, and on those mornings I would skip off to meet her. But when I arrived, my envy that she had found a way to buy and live in these places would provoke me into saying something about the need for legislation to prevent people making all this money out of buying and selling and renting property, on the pressing need to redistribute wealth.

‘Well, thank God we have people like you, willing to redistribute your wealth to landlords and the Albanian mafia,’ Amy would say. ‘When there are such scumbags out there, saving their money and trying to pull themselves up.’

Then I might point out that she was just lucky to get her timing right, and she’d say I was born two years before her, and I might say I was busy thinking of things more important than money, and she’d say nightclubs? haircuts? ecstasy? and ask me where that had got me, and I’d say – well, and where has all the money you saved and earned got you?

Calmer and better decorating would be done if I absented myself. We would eventually agree this, but not calmly.

*

But I felt optimistic as I biked across the park to her new flat, a couple of miles from the one she’d just sold for nearly three times the price she’d paid for it ten years ago. I was becoming more and more aware how ordinary my aspirations were, how I admired wealth in those depths of the heart that are immune to convictions. I believed, like Sophie, that no one should own their own house, except for all the beautiful young parents chasing their children round the playground on the top of the hill, those mothers caught in the golden light of a catalogue’s autumn range, these bearded fathers with slight tummies over Japanese jeans, a bright advert for the urban dream, a Brooklyn here on earth. I wanted to be one of them, to circumscribe my life with bricks and money and the proximity of green space.

Amy’s new place was the bottom floor of a big detached house facing the park. I saw the man who must have been Ben the acupuncturist through the window, on a stepladder, painting the ceiling with a roller.

*